


blood-thirsting carrion birds

by ronsenboobi (snewvilliurs)



Series: blood-thirsting carrion birds (and other stories) [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Baggage, Emotionally Repressed Ala Mhigans, Enemies to Friends, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Friends to Enemies, Gen, Non-Chronological, Patch 3.5: The Far Edge of Fate Spoilers, Patch 4.0: Stormblood Spoilers, Patch 4.1: The Legend Returns, Patch 4.5: A Requiem For Heroes Spoilers, Redemption, Specific Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:07:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 20
Words: 59,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24665125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snewvilliurs/pseuds/ronsenboobi
Summary: For once, Morgana had let her own anger lull her into believing that the fates had reached the height of their depravity—and she had been wrong.In another world, the drowning man does not die, and redemption is not absolution. An "antagonist lives" AU set throughout A Realm Reborn and subsequent patches, all the way to the aftermath of Ala Mhigo's liberation.
Relationships: Ilberd Feare & Warrior of Light, Original Female Character & Original Male Character, Raubahn Aldynn & Ilberd Feare, Raubahn Aldynn/Warrior of Light
Series: blood-thirsting carrion birds (and other stories) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1938766
Comments: 68
Kudos: 18





	1. 3.0 ― ISHGARD ― THANALAN

**Author's Note:**

> This a Warrior of Light AU for my non-WoL adventurer, Morgana Arroway - a former gladiator, sellsword, and member of the Ala Mhigan Resistance - and her son, half-Elezen ranger Sairsel Arroway.
> 
> For context: Morgana's past as a gladiator is unchanged from my canon series, detailed in chapters 2-5 of [_liberty or death_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20909603).
> 
> Title taken from a line in FFXII: "In the end, we are the same: blood-thirsting carrion birds, hell-bent on revenge!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warnings: brief allusion to sexual assault, minor uses of sexist and ableist language in dialogue

Snow did not blind like sand.

Of all the things to think with such blank clarity, this one thought passed through Morgana like lightning slicing through the sky. Sand was a heavy veil, thick in the way it drank the sun; snow gleamed like a blade.

Her first summer in Thanalan, Morgana had thought that the heat would burn her from the inside. She thought of nothing but the dry winds of the highlands, the sun-warmed rock in the hills—she even missed the dust, the reddish sand from the Peaks. 

Now, she rubbed at her eyes to press black spots into her vision as the sun streaked through the snow with the sharpness of a knife. Her fingers had the sting of ice; the cold had burrowed into her bones, piercing her worse than it ever did even on the coldest nights in the desert, when hunger stripped her of everything that could keep her warm but for her anger.

Here, not even rage could keep her warm. She reached for it, again and again, and she knew it like she knew the sound of her own breath—white before her lips, always white now—but it had no flame. Years in the desert had thinned her skin, attuned her to the heat. It made her hate Ul’dah almost as fiercely as she did when it first became her home, for stripping her of so much. Of everything. She was cold and numb and she nursed the feeling of being stabbed over and over like an old injury.

The mug burned through her fingers and the heat barely even settled into her; the sweet sting of the hot chocolate on her tongue felt almost absurd.

“This needs more spice,” she said, her voice coming in a ragged croak. She took a bigger sip and cleared her throat.

Haurchefant looked at her with a wide-eyed, desperate-to-please sort of confusion. Morgana realized with a pang that he reminded her of Sairsel, with the ruined part of him owed entirely to her. She couldn’t think of the poor fool alone in Little Ala Mhigo now, torn between chipping away at himself to fit in and an unrelenting stubbornness about who he was that felt painfully Mhigan.

She couldn’t think of the dead boy, either. She couldn’t.

“I— Spice? In hot chocolate?”

“Yes. Red pepper; bit of a kick.” She brushed away a snowflake as it caught on her eyelashes. “There was a vendor who’d set up a stall right outside of Ala Mhigo every year after the first snowfall—she heaped handfuls of red pepper into this massive cauldron of hot chocolate. Disappeared as soon as the first blossom crept out of the earth in the spring. No one knew who she was.”

Distant as she felt, Morgana knew that Haurchefant was listening—always with rapt attention—and she remembered by the look on his face why she had almost never spoken of home in the last nineteen years. Not to strangers.

“I can see about procuring some red pepper for you,” he said kindly.

“Don’t bother.”

Pity was a poison. She needed to spit it out before it touched her.

Morgana looked away before she could see the sad puppy look flitting across Haurchefant’s face; she wasn’t responsible for the sins of his father. It was enough that she felt the weight of her own tugging at her, digging and digging with every passing thought where she remembered that she’d left Sairsel behind again. When she let go of him as a babe, it was like she was being flayed alive.

Alphinaud stepped out into the snow wringing his hands: another ruined boy, because somehow Morgana had to be surrounded by ruined boys, choked by the ghost of the boy dead in the water with blood staining the pristine blue of his coat black.

“Lord Haurchefant,” she heard him say, prim and proper as always. Then his voice turned grave, almost careful: “Morgana.”

“You don’t need to talk to me like I have the authority to send you to bed without supper, boy.”

Alphinaud sighed, letting go of a breath that bordered on a nervous chuckle. “It’s not that. I… Might you come inside and sit by the fire? We would be more comfortable to talk.”

There was nothing to like about the biting wind, the cold-drunk stone and the overabundance of grey everywhere she looked, but Morgana still said, “I like it better out here.”

“Very well,” Alphinaud said, and paced aimlessly for a few steps in front of Morgana’s bench, wringing his hands again. “We’ve received a report from Lady Yugiri. From Ul’dah.”

“Go on.”

“It’s not good.”

“Tell me, Alphinaud,” Morgana snapped.

“As we expected, there are myriad rumours of our crimes against the Ul’dahn state—no clear allegations have been made, but our sudden and conspicuous absence does give credence to the claims. It appears that anyone who would benefit, as Teledji did, has been taking great pains to remind anyone who will listen of your origins,” Alphinaud said, mountingly uncomfortable. “The Brass Blades have been using this as an excuse to heighten their presence around Little Ala Mhigo.”

Morgana breathed a cold burst of rage out through her nose. “Bloody bastards. Have there been deaths yet?” Alphinaud shook his head. “Rapes?”

“Not… not that I know of, no,” he said, pale. “They’ve—”

“I know the way they assert their authority, lad,” she said, because she didn’t need to be lectured on familiar suffering by a sheltered boy, no matter how good-hearted and well-meaning. They withheld shipments of food for days longer than necessary while already meagre stores dwindled, knocked around the frailest of the elders, cornered the women so that they had no choice. She knew it all. “Is there anything else?”

This time, Alphinaud couldn’t stomach meeting her gaze. He gritted his teeth. “The Crystal Braves have been seen operating in Thanalan. We believe they’ve moved the Flame General from the Marasaja Pit to await execution.”

A gust of wind cut Morgana’s breath short. “What?” she bit out. Alphinaud said nothing; what else was there to say? “Where did they take him?”

“Based on the Braves’ movements—and Ilberd’s occasional presence since—Halatali.”

Morgana set down her mug harder on the bench than necessary, bile rising up her throat as she got to her feet. The press of both Alphinaud and Haurchefant’s attention was unbearable; she turned away and gripped the railing until the cold burned her palms and her knuckles turned white. Foundation stretched far below, and she wanted nothing more than to scream until they all mistook her fury for Halone’s.

Halatali. She remembered the stench: a rot that went deeper than flesh, stinking animals and desperate gladiators who lived in cells between bouts until they found freedom from the chains or in death. Gladiators like Raubahn, when they dragged him to Ul’dah as a spy and made him fight until he earned a place in the barracks. _This is a place for beasts,_ the guildmaster had said the first time she and Gotwin were taken there to train. _Give the lanista a reason to throw you in there, and you won’t come out right._ The guild made the bloodsands into hallowed ground, and Halatali was the curse—Nald and Thal.

Ilberd didn’t mean to see Raubahn executed somewhere hidden; he meant to mire his death in shame.

Morgana didn’t scream. She spoke instead, low and hard, so quiet that the wind barely carried her words to Alphinaud’s ears. “I’m going to gut the vile son of a whore and string him up with his own innards from the aetheryte in Mor Dhona.”

“My friend,” Haurchefant said pacifyingly.

“We must go about this carefully,” added Alphinaud.

“I’m not letting Raubahn die in there,” Morgana said, turning. She grabbed her sword where she’d left it propped against the bench—not really hers but Raubahn’s, the twin of Tizona she had taken up from the ground after watching it be cut from his arm—and strapped the scabbard to her back so roughly that it nearly cut her breath as she walked past Alphinaud and Haurchefant. “Wait and plan and strategize all you like. I’ve spent too long twiddling my thumbs in this frozen hellspit.”

“Morgana, I understand your anger, and believe me, it is well-deserved—”

“You do _not_ understand. Ilberd Feare does. He understands what it is for Raubahn to rot in Halatali and die on his knees in the filth, no better than a dog.” Morgana swallowed, tasting metal, and felt like she could choke on it. “Raubahn is a gladiator. He was my brother on the sands and he is my countryman—I’m getting him out of there.”

She had not sold the blood from her flesh and turned it into pride to sit idly by and risk letting him die like a slave. She had not found her brother’s body bled dry into the desert sand without a sword in his hand only to watch it happen again to a man she once— 

To a man she respected. Morgana would have scoffed at the very idea when she saw him again for the first time at that ostentatious banquet, fat on coin and power as she saw him then—but she’d been wrong. He had always been the man she used to know.

As she buckled on the blackened pieces of her new armour, her gleaming paladin plate long since discarded as she should have from the start, she could only wonder whether she was still the woman he knew—a gladiator burning with sorrowful anger, strong and bright and alive—but the truth was that it did not matter.

She was still unbroken after all those years, and she had fury enough to see this through.

A storm raged, dry and wild, as Morgana’s feet sank into the sand outside of Drybone. Without rain, the sand was a storm in itself: it rose with the whipping gales and hung so thick in the air that the lights of Ul’dah in the southwest were little more than stars in a muddled sky. Morgana felt the heat of her breath in the way the scarf wound tight around her nose and mouth clung to her skin—and for once, she welcomed it. 

She welcomed the heat, the deep crackling of electricity hanging in the air every time jagged purple-white lightning split the sky. The sound rent the air, grounded Morgana into a strange sense of calm within the hollows of her spirit that clamoured for violence.

The Destroyer heard. The Destroyer heralded.

Beside her, Alphinaud jumped at a sudden clap of thunder. “I suppose this could be taken as a sign that Rhalgr keeps watch over our mission,” he said sheepishly.

“Don’t expect him to keep you safe. There’s a reason the lightning is his,” Morgana said. “He can’t protect. He only destroys.”

“Then why worship him?” Alphinaud asked. Always with the questions; always needing to understand the world in its workings. “I never fully understood it.”

“Destruction is strength, boy. Rhalgr gives us strength that we may fight—that we may protect each other. It is in our hands; not the gods’.”

Lightning struck clearly ahead, cutting her a path in the sky. 

Morgana pressed on until she saw the familiar shadows of ruined stone that surrounded Halatali’s entrance, the carved stairs leading down into a glimpse of a minor hell. Shadows moved on the desert sands and guards fell, their blue coats stark under another flash cut through the sky with a clap. When the shinobi signalled that the way was clear, Morgana stormed inside Halatali like an army.

A part of her wished Ilberd knew she was coming, but she settled for the rush of blood thundering in her ears as she fought. Once, the gloom and the stench were so oppressive they had nearly made her ill; now, the deeper she found herself in the bowels of Halatali, the more certain she felt. She gave her fury blood, and it howled for more—and she embraced it. Let it drive her.

When they found Raubahn, the fire turned to scorching. Imprisonment had made him thin, worn him ragged. Morgana stilled at the sight of him, not knowing whether it was his maiming or the loss of his sultana that had put this deadened resignation in his eyes. She looked for a mirror of her anger and did not find it.

Not until she was face to face with Ilberd—and there she saw it. The rage. It took hold like a root, like an anchor, like a poison.

Something within Morgana’s ribcage burst, her blood turning into seething seas ravaged by a killing wind.

“Ilberd!” she screamed with all the force in her lungs. She didn’t want him to look at anyone but her. He needed to know her rage.

When their swords clashed, the poison dripped from Ilberd’s blade; he fought like a man with nothing and everything to lose. Every parry reverberated through Morgana’s hands like the rumble of the storm, and she growled and bit with something primal and nearly forgotten since her days on the bloodsands. A swift slash, and she drew blood along Ilberd’s side. His blade caught her shoulder but she didn’t yelp at the burst of pain, wet and sharp and bright-hot.

And all at once, the storm ended.

Morgana stood with her body taut, her hips and feet aligned with her shoulders, her sword a perfect extension of her arm as the tip of her blade gleamed at Ilberd’s throat. The instinct that drove her was the same that made her stop at the touch of metal against the side of her neck, resting along one of the old scars in her flesh like it belonged there.

“Go on,” Ilberd drawled, his voice a tumble of cold northern air. His free hand gripped Morgana’s sword, pressing it harder into the hollow of his throat. “See if you can end me before I slit your throat, Arroway.”

Morgana was quick. She’d have a chance.

“Lay down your weapon, Ilberd,” Alphinaud said, his command weakened by alarm.

Ilberd’s gaze did not stray from Morgana’s.

“Why haven’t you done it yet?” she asked, her voice low. All at once, her careful grip on the dead boy slipped, and he filled her mind the way his blood had flowed out into the water. Wilred, eager and naïve and loyal, dead in the Shroud for nothing—like too many before him. Like too many, and yet like no one else: killed by his own. “Where did these newfound scruples come from? It could be as easy as stabbing a boy in the back.”

Ilberd’s sword shifted, pulling back from her neck, and Morgana’s fingers tightened around the hilt of her own blade to pierce—

“Morgana!”

A burst of magic struck the ground, pallid grey flashing in Morgana’s vision as the wind was knocked out of her lungs. Her bloodied shoulder hit the ground hard, tearing a strangled cry from her throat with a stab of pain that spread down to her fingertips. Dizzy, she scrambled to her feet, sword held in front of her with a waver.

“Clever little shite,” Ilberd growled slowly, looking past Morgana’s shoulder. “Can’t have a dead Warrior of Light on your hands, can you?”

Quicker than she could think, Morgana moved in front of Alphinaud with her left hand held back, shielding him. “Do not speak to him. This is between you and I.”

“You and I, is it? What has become of you, hero?” Ilberd asked, speaking the word like a curse. His lip curled into a sneer as he looked her up and down. “No better than the lowest sellsword, drunk on coin and an illusion of power. A tool to be used and discarded by all these noble Eorzeans who spat on you for twenty years!”

Morgana scoffed. “And Lolorito’s gold doesn’t gleam? We both have always been sellswords, but at least I haven’t chosen to be a coin-lord’s whore.”

“I know what I am!” Ilberd snapped. “There is no shame that I will not bear, Arroway—nothing I will not do to take back Ala Mhigo. I will do everything you dare not.”

“I _dare_ not? You bloody—”

Ilberd’s gaze slipped towards Raubahn, if only for a moment. “You’re both fools playing at being heroes, too afraid and too weak to do what needs to be done, and blind with righteousness besides.”

It was on the embers of her pride that Morgana’s anger caught again. She should have been angry for Raubahn, for Wilred, for the Braves and the blood being spilt that somehow never belonged to the imperials—and yet she was angry that Ilberd claimed Ala Mhigo itself from her. That he accused her of forgetting the cause when it was the only thing that had kept her alive for nearly two decades.

Her voice came hard as a shield, sharp as a blade. “Where were you these past years? What have you done for your countrymen starving and dying without hope in the desert? I have been fighting for them every day of my life and it is more than you or Raubahn have ever done for them! Taking back our homeland means nothing if you let our people in Little Ala Mhigo live in squalor.”

“Do not lecture me, woman.”

“You’re right,” Morgana spat. “I ought to feed you your balls, you craven bastard.”

Ilberd grinned, cold with the promise of violence. Morgana lunged for him, her blade swiping at his throat, only making the barest cut as he pulled his shoulders back. Her anger swelled with a growl; Ilberd backhanded her hard, catching only half of her cheek and nose.

Blood spilled in a hot rush over Morgana’s lip, a brand new jolt of pain shaking her focus. When she made to attack again, something jerked her back by the arm.

And Ilberd hesitated, sword poised, the opening in her guard so obvious a child could see it. His other hand lashed out, throwing down a bomb that burst with light.

Morgana roared when her vision cleared: Ilberd was gone. She shook herself loose from Alphinaud’s grip. “What have you done? I had him!”

“He could have killed you!”

“With your bloody help!” she said, wiping a hand under her bleeding nose. “Since when do any of you give a damn whether I’ll die doing your bidding?”

Alphinaud opened his mouth for what was sure to be a properly thorny retort, but Yugiri’s calm voice stopped him.

“There would have been no clean deaths tonight,” she said, nodding towards Raubahn. “The general saw it. He was the one who signalled for Master Alphinaud to stop you.”

“Morgana,” Raubahn said thinly.

It felt like being shaken awake. Morgana’s anger parted enough to let her see clearly: Raubahn’s own had never left him. It was in every part of him, silent as quicksand. She was a blind fool for having missed it.

When she knelt before him and touched his shoulder, Raubahn nearly flinched. He looked up at her, his grey eyes as steady as they had always been. Bowed, but never broken—she understood.

“If all you wanted was to help me gut him, you could have said so.”

Raubahn almost laughed. “You wouldn’t have heard me if I had,” he said, and Morgana felt him tremble with exhaustion and hunger as she pushed back the hair from his face. “You came. Even— I’m but a cripple and a fool, yet still you came for me.”

His hand went to his left shoulder, fingers digging into the skin above his bandages. Morgana didn’t look; it felt like she shouldn’t, like she’d already seen too much. All she did was scoff.

“Don’t be so maudlin; I’ve seen you take on half a dozen angry Ul’dahns with one hand tied behind your back and not take a single blow.”

“Aye, at twenty-five summers.”

“And _I’ve_ only gotten better with age, so permit me to believe you’d still be capable,” Morgana said. A ghost of a smile passed over her lips, and she didn’t know what made her say it—perhaps Raubahn’s vulnerability, so rare and yet so familiar; perhaps her own in the aftershocks of the last few weeks catching up to her. “You’ve always been a fool, but I’d still come for you a hundred times.”

She rose to her feet, thrusting down her hand with the palm turned upward. “On your feet, gladiator. Your fighting days aren’t over.”

Raubahn’s fingers were cold as they closed over her wrist, but he was alive, and Morgana had learned that alive could be more than enough. She helped him stand, as slowly as he needed it, and looped his arm around her shoulders—not nearly as heavy as it should be, and it gnawed at her insides to feel it.

Outside, the storm had gone silent, and the emptiness of Halatali itself in the absence of chaos was even more oppressive than the noise. Yugiri scouted ahead, quick and quiet—whether out of efficiency or because she needed to leave this place as desperately as the others did—and Alphinaud followed not far behind her, though his way of looking over his shoulder every few paces betrayed his concern.

They did not speak. These stone walls were not meant for the lull of voices, nor for anything that wasn’t violence. The bloodsands had the roar of the crowd to drown out the rest, but not this place. Morgana could feel it stifling Raubahn, could feel the weight behind every step. When they finally climbed the stairs to the surface, he stopped and looked at the bloated black sky and the sand and breathed the still-crackling air like he’d never tasted anything so sweet.

Morgana tilted her face up towards him, and Raubahn let his head bow, closing his eyes as he touched his brow to hers.

It was enough.


	2. 2.3 ― REVENANT'S TOLL

Stripping off her armour in her cubicle of a room in the Rising Stones was, for Morgana, still a strange and not quite yet soothing ritual. She had come to understand that her body felt wrong in the silence, without the desert heat and the stifling exhaustion that used to come every night when she settled down in Little Ala Mhigo, tiptoeing around the closely-packed bedrolls of her Resistance comrades. Most days, she felt like a traitor for her absence; she took comfort in the steady flow of gil, weapons, and intelligence on imperial activity she had made a habit of sending to the old bear, but it never felt like enough.

Never enough to feel at peace. Never enough to sleep. 

The night was cool and quiet. F’lhaminn didn’t ask when Morgana requested two tankards of ale; they shared a smile, and Morgana let their fingers brush as she took the ales. She’d already have made a proposition if not for Thancred’s lurking about wherever F’lhaminn was since the move, but she found that she rather enjoyed being subtle about it. She couldn’t remember the last time she had properly made an effort to flirt with a woman the way she courted Saskia, in another life.

The memory made her ache; it always would. Not a day went by without a pang for something that was lost, but being away from Little Ala Mhigo was reminding her that constant misery could be a slow poison. It was a luxury to be able to walk away from it, even if only in stolen moments at the weary end of a day.

Morgana walked through Revenant’s Toll like a thief with the tankards in hand, her eyes going to the ramparts: the same figure still stood in the spot where she’d seen it before she went inside, deep blue jacket draped over the edge of the parapet. Going up the stairs two by two, she felt as though she were going to a statue—but the illusion only lasted a moment. 

Ilberd turned at her approach, but said nothing.

“One would think that the Braves are better organized than to need their captain taking watches on his own so late in the evening,” Morgana said by way of greeting. She leaned against the parapet, carefully balancing a tankard along its edge between the two of them.

Ilberd shrugged. “It isn’t so much that the watch needs me as it is the other way around. I think I may be too old for how noisy the barracks get at this hour,” he admitted as he reached for the tankard.

Morgana lifted her own in a silent salute, then drank. Had the two of them been at the Rising Stones tonight, this would be around the time Yda and Thancred usually picked to bicker and challenge each other over their respective tolerance for drink.

“Is it the privilege of every Brave to be welcomed to the ranks with an ale from the Warrior of Light herself?” Ilberd asked, turning a sly smile on Morgana.

“I can say it is if it’ll stop you flattering yourself,” she snorted. “How often do you have the chance to drink with your own people?”

“Well, there is young Wilred. He speaks highly of you.”

Morgana wondered if whatever Wilred had to say about her included how very close she came to boxing his ears after the primal summoning debacle.

“He’s a good lad. Too eager for his own good,” she said, and drank hard at the thought of her own boy, eager in such a thorny way that he couldn’t possibly be mistaken for anyone’s son but hers. The ale was bitter on her tongue. She turned back to Ilberd: “Where from?”

It was a wonder they’d already gone this long without the question being asked at all—in her experience, it usually came within the first few greetings exchanged between her countrymen, regardless of what business needed doing. She could still remember when it was too fresh to speak of home for most of them, but Morgana preferred the sting of memory to forgetting.

 _Where from._ So simple, and yet the words were a tether to the homes they’d lost—and they drew bonds between strangers. That was Ala Mhigo.

“Coldhearth,” Ilberd said, and Morgana almost wanted to laugh—but she wasn’t entirely certain whether it would sound bitter or half-mad.

“You know Raubahn Aldynn?”

Ilberd’s expression was inscrutable. “Aye. We were lads together. Left Ala Mhigo together. I hear he’s done well for himself.”

Morgana thought she recognized the bitterness hidden deep in the lines of his face; she still wasn’t certain whether she’d entirely pushed past her own judgement of Raubahn in the last few months of working closely with him.

“That he has, aye,” she said with a nod. Raubahn clearly hadn’t stopped being a good man—neither wealth nor power seemed to have cured him of it—but Morgana didn’t know how to divorce her disdain for Ul’dah from the thought that he must be complicit in its workings. She supposed that was unfair, but she’d learned that fairness was, for the most part, little more than a pretty illusion. “I fought with him in the Coliseum a few times.”

 _That’s a gross understatement,_ she could almost hear Gotwin snort. Had her brother been beside her now, Ilberd would already be privy to the whole sordid story.

Not that she imagined she would be here at all if Gotwin were alive.

“I didn’t know you were a gladiator.”

Morgana shrugged. “I didn’t build a fortune nor a legend in the Coliseum the way he did. I was a body on the sands a few months, and I’m glad that it’s easy enough for a body to disappear. Never set out to make a name for myself.”

“And now here stands Morgana Arroway, Hydaelyn’s Chosen,” Ilberd said with a smirk. He kept his gaze on her as he drank. “Arroway. My mother’s brother knew a Galwen Arroway. Old kingsguard, he lost—”

“His leg in a raid near the Gridania border,” Morgana finished for him. “My grandfather.”

“Strong family. Did you serve?”

This time, Morgana did laugh: a sudden, humourless burst. “Hells, no. My brother and I were sellswords. Fought in the revolt against the mad king, and all that. You?”

“Sellsword. Never stopped, and now I’m here.”

Morgana noded and scraped a nail along a scratch on the side of the tankard. The next question never had an easy answer—but it, too, was necessary. Even if loss was all they had to speak of, they could only share it, and every story was a reason to fight.

“Any family?”

Ilberd breathed in slowly. “Not anymore.” 

He looked at Morgana, expectant. She shook her head.

“Left my woman behind in Ala Mhigo to get my brother and his family out—his son couldn’t have been older than seven summers. They died this side of the Wall.”

“Bloody hells,” Ilberd muttered, taking a long drink. “My daughter was still in swaddling clothes when we left. We’ve all been played for fools, haven’t we? We left everything behind, chose not to fight to keep our children safe—and for what?”

“I’ve been asking myself that question every day for the last eighteen years. Can’t find an answer most days.”

Ilberd smoothed a hand over his hair, head bowed, and frowned deep. For a moment, they stood drinking in silence, both as comfortable in their old hurts as they could be. 

Then something shifted. Morgana felt the familiar pull: something inside her plucked a string inside Ilberd, heedless of choice—forcing her to hear. The Echo pierced through her head, resonant, and she sank into it with a curse.

The girl sits in the shade, stabbing a needle through a sock. Her gaze is a dark glare fixed on the training dummy that stands at the edge of the vegetable garden, serving its noble second duty as a scarecrow. Ilberd ambles towards her, saddlebag slung over his shoulder, and props his sword and shield against the wall beside her.

“You’ll prick yourself,” he says, leaning over to check her work. The stitches are tight, puckering like a badly healed scar.

The girl does not look at him.

Ilberd nudges her foot with his boot. “Your father’s home, lass. A ‘hello’ might be nice.”

All he gets is a quick, strained smile before his daughter, blood of his blood and flesh of his flesh, returns to the painstaking work of stabbing the sock with her needle. He raises his eyebrows, puffs out a sigh, and turns to go inside—but does not neglect to ruffle her hair before he does. At fifteen, she is quick as a cat and hits harder than some grown men Ilberd has fought, but he is still fast enough to dodge the swat of her hand.

There is a warmer welcome inside. The bronze saint of a woman standing in the kitchen beams at him, onyx eyes crinkling at the corners, and plucks a vibrant green leaf from a bunch on her cutting board.

“Open,” she says, tapping a finger against his bottom lip. He obliges, nipping at her skin as she puts the leaf in his mouth. “We had our first harvest this morning. Nedric was beside himself.”

“The oregano? Already?”

The saint nods, swatting at a springy black curl that falls over her forehead—with the same sharpness of movement as the girl—and Ilberd catches her wrist to look at the reddened patch of skin on the side of her hand.

“Do I want to ask?”

“I nudged a bit of hot steel. It’s really nothing for my nursemaid of a husband to fuss over,” she says dismissively.

“Ros,” he says, not quite scolding.

“Ilberd,” she mirrors, going to her workbench and rifling through the mess of her discarded tools—hammers, tongs, rasps—to brandish a small piece of metal no bigger than a coin. “I’m close. This is almost as good as proper molybdenum. It’ll be worth every little burn, I promise.”

Ilberd smiles and inspects the metal, then presses a kiss to her temple. “I know it will be. Just be careful—for the sake of your nursemaid of a husband.” He glances outside the window, where the girl is still stabbing away. “What’s gotten into Steorra?”

The whole of Ros’s demeanour shifts, her nose scrunching as she crosses her arms with a stern look. “Your daughter,” she says, and raises her voice to make sure it carries outside: “is experiencing consequences for her actions.”

“I thought we’d agreed we weren’t going to make the necessary chores into punishments.”

Ros snorts. “It’s not the sewing that’s the punishment. It’s the silence.”

“You devious woman,” Ilberd says. “What did she do to deserve such a sentence?”

“Let’s see,” Ros says, and calls: “Boys! Father is home!”

What follows is the noise of a storm as two boys come thundering down the hall: both equal in height and in dishevelment, with the same mop of wavy black hair falling over their black eyes—two boys identical but for a red scratch swelling into a nice bump on the forehead of the one who lingers behind when his brother jumps into Ilberd’s arms.

“Da!”

“Hello, you little imp. Have you been behaving?”

“I have. Better than Balder, at least,” Nedric says, sticking his tongue out at his brother.

Ilberd tugs on his tongue. “Keep that in your mouth or you’ll lose it,” he says lightly as he sets him down, putting a hand on Balder’s brow to push back his hair and study his injury. “All my children are mischief-makers.”

“It’s a curse,” Ros agrees.

“So says the queen mischief-maker herself,” Ilberd says, then gives Balder a serious look. “I don’t imagine your sister’s thumped you for no reason.”

“No,” Balder says glumly.

“Have you learned your lesson?”

Balder shoots his mother a look that speaks volumes as to the lecture he must have gotten in addition to Steorra’s unlawful thumping. “Aye.”

For good measure, Ilberd glances at Ros. She gives a satisfied nod. “Well, good,” he says, and brushes hair directly into both of the twins’ eyes. “On the bright side, we’ll be able to tell you two apart for a good fortnight after today, for a change. No more of that chore-swapping mischief. It’ll be a dream.”

The twins shove at each other.

“Now, be good and help Ma with supper. I’ll go speak with the criminal.”

“I may have told Steorra you were going to tan her hide when you came home,” Ros says, touching her husband’s arm.

Ilberd sighs. “The things I do for you, woman,” he says, betraying his fondness as he kisses her to a duet of gags and disgusted noises. The twins slink back—still shoving each other, their brief moment of solidarity forgotten—when he points a threatening finger at them. “I want to see you working by the time I walk out of that door, lads.”

His words have an efficiency that makes Ros throw her hands up—“They never listen to me,” she mutters—and Ilberd is satisfied as he goes back outside.

Steorra has moved on from her work with the sock to whittling aggressively at a stick that grows smaller and pointier with every passing second.

“Which one of your brothers do you intend to stab with that?”

“Whichever one is more annoying in the moment,” Steorra mumbles with a growl sitting at the bottom of her throat. She has grown up into a wild thing; Ros calls it a curse of intuition, says that she is a dry forest waiting for a spark because her heart drinks up her father’s rage without ever seeing it.

Ilberd can only sigh. “We can’t hurt our own, Steorra. You know that.”

“He was being a little shite.”

“Even if they’re being little shites. Even if we’re angry and disappointed and we want nothing more than to tear them down—Mhigans don’t hurt our own,” Ilberd says emphatically, then adds, as an afterthought: “And watch your language.”

Steorra snorts. “I thought you said you fought to settle disagreements all the time back home.”

“Aye: fighting that is mutually agreed upon. It is not the same as a grown girl beating down on a little boy because he irritated her, and if you aren’t old enough to understand that, you aren’t old enough to fight.”

“But, Da—” Steorra says, her voice rising.

“None of that. I said what I said.” Ilberd crosses his arms over his chest and leans his back against the wall, standing beside her rather than in front of her. “What did Balder do?”

Steorra’s knife slashes particularly viciously at a chunk of wood. “He went through my things and he read—he found this stupid silly thing that I wrote _privately,_ for myself, when I was feeling stupid and silly, and he read it out loud to Nedric and to Ma like he was a bloody town crier.”

“I still don’t enjoy the language, lass,” Ilberd says. “What did you write?”

“I’m not saying,” Steorra grumbles, her face darkening like a storm cloud.

“I can always ask Ma to tell me. Or Balder.”

Ilberd waits patiently as Steorra’s face takes on a vibrant shade of red. She grips her knife harder, lets out a proper growl, and speaks through her teeth.

“ _Sweet Mother, I cannot weave—slender Menphina has overcome me with longing for a girl._ ”

“Ah,” Ilberd says, pressing his lips together to keep himself from laughing. Steorra shoots him a spine-chilling glare that does nothing to lessen his fondness.

“I told you it’s silly. Balder had no business—”

“And you struck him because he made you feel embarrassed. You’ve both done wrong, but your brother says he’s learned his lesson while all you’ve done is blame him for your actions. All that tells me is you ought to take a beating, too,” Ilberd says, holding out his hand for the knife.

Steorra falls silent with dread. She stands and places the knife and stick in her father’s hand, avoiding his gaze as he places both on the windowsill and turns away. She almost doesn’t catch the training sword he tosses at her, so focused as she is on her own misery. Ilberd taps his training sword on the wooden shield that has always looked so small on his arm to get her attention.

“You’re going to show me you can beat on someone your own size, for a change.”

Steorra makes a face. “You’re twice as big as I am. Don’t I get a shield?”

“No. So keep your guard up, or I’ll ring your head like a bell,” Ilberd says, and turns to head into the tall grasses where they always train, chuckling to himself. “My daughter, a warrior poet. What an age we live in.”

Morgana’s vision warps, and what she sees instead of the tall grasses is a barren field and a smoldering wreck of ash. The sky is a churning sea of red and black, still sick with the colour that lingered for days after Dalamud fell, reigning over the blackened ruin of the little house.

She doesn’t want to see what’s coming. She doesn’t want it, but the Echo flows like a sea that has never known the restraint of a dam, and she can only watch as Ilberd runs through the wreckage. She can only stand, horror and grief flooding her as the poisoned blessing takes away even the luxury of averting her gaze, and watch the four silent bodies welcoming him home.

“Are you all right?”

Morgana had to fight the nausea that threatened to climb up her throat. “I’m fine,” she said, uselessly batting her hand at Ilberd’s arm as he helped her keep her balance. His skin was warm, burning, crackling like a storm against hers—but it felt perverse to even look at him after what she’d seen, let alone touch him as comrades.

“You’re a fate-walker,” he said, not quite surprised or incredulous. “I suppose witnessing it isn’t the same as hearing about it.”

Morgana was no stranger to irony, but this felt especially bitter. Ilberd could have told her the whole story of his own accord, and she might have stood fast as she listened and drawn up the walls that let her sympathize with him without his pain bringing her to her knees. Before the Echo, it had been so easy: they shared their stories, but she didn’t let herself drown in someone else’s blood.

And now this. “It isn’t,” she said, letting out a breath.

“What did you see?”

“I don’t choose it. There’s nothing to control. I had no more consent for it than you did.”

“All right,” Ilberd said calmly, but his voice was hard in its wariness—a shield. Morgana knew that well. “But you at least owe me the knowledge of it. What did you see?”

“Your family.” His touch left her entirely; he stepped back like she had the plague. “Before the Calamity—just a simple memory. And… after. When you came home.”

Ilberd had a tighter grip on his anger than Morgana did, but she felt it slipping in the tensing of his shoulders, the curling of his fists. His gaze hardened when he looked at her—when he dared it—and she couldn’t blame him for it. If some near stranger, Mhigan or no, had stumbled upon her most intimate memories, she’d be enraged.

Finding Gotwin dead in the desert. Letting Saskia’s hand slip from hers in the dead of night while Ala Mhigo burned. Pushing Sairsel, fragile and beautiful and squalling, into his father’s arms for the last time. She couldn’t even begin to imagine the sheer violation of Ilberd seeing it all.

Still, his question felt like a punch landing just below her ribs—because she’d been expecting his anger, but not this: “Did you see how they died?” he asked, so quietly she barely heard it above the sound of her own breath.

“No. I could only see your memories.”

Ilberd nodded. His silence choked her.

“I wish I hadn’t seen it,” Morgana said. “It’s yours. Not mine.”

“I wish I hadn’t lived it. Fat lot of good that does us,” Ilberd said coldly, picking up his uniform jacket and turning to walk away. “Her blessing is a blight.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the notion of ilberd having lost his wife and children in the calamity is actually based on canon from the french localization of 2.3 (the rest is, unfortunately for all of us, all me); you can see a comparison of his introductory dialogue in english and french [here](https://livvyplaysfinalfantasy.tumblr.com/post/166627836489/ive-maintained-for-months-now-that-ilberds), courtesy of my buddy livvy. thank you for all your invaluable input!


	3. 2.55 ― UL'DAH

“You look weak, Raubahn.”

Raubahn’s head snapped up, bleary eyes squinting at the burst of light that poured in from behind the shadow at his cell door. The precious few seconds it took to shake the fog from his mind were lost to him: a weakness upon which a coiled viper might strike. 

There were moments where he thought himself on the bloodsands again, facing blades that lashed out from the shadows without a wielder’s gaze to show intent, without a body’s tells—like listening at a door, knowing that it was a language he knew like the sound of his own heartbeat, and hearing only warped voices. His agony came in fits and starts: a haze that pulled him under like a restless sea, its waves letting him break the surface and gasp for breath only to strip the clarity from his mind. Healers came and went to tend to his bandages and the onset of fever, and in their silhouettes he thought he saw—

He saw— 

Pipin, a silent judge; in his eyes, Raubahn could see a monument crumbling, broken and bleeding on the sands. Nanamo, her veins black and her skin ashen as blood streamed from her nose—and yet she looked at him, gripping the golden scales in her right hand, ready to balance his worth and his failure.

Sometimes he fought Ilberd, again and again and again, and Ilberd hacked at more and more of him until he was carving the heart from his chest. Sometimes he only heard Ilberd’s voice, searched for his shadow when thunder rolled high above. And in every flash of lightning, every blinding meteor that raged in the sky as he drowned in a blood-red memory, he saw _her_.

Judgement came, relentless, and found him wanting at every turn.

But he hadn’t gone mad yet. This time, it wasn’t a fevered imagining—he had strength enough to know that the shadow was real, that the venom in Ilberd’s voice came from his mouth. And Raubahn welcomed it.

“I feel weak,” he agreed, his voice strange to his own ears. Feeble and raw, stripped of its own life.

“A pale little flame guttering out at the end of a wick. I am sorry to see it, old friend.” Ilberd moved closer to the bars, arms crossed over his chest. He still wore the blue coat. “How is your arm?”

“Why not ask Lolorito? He might toss you the bone if you roll over.”

The words were a double-edged sword, and Raubahn was fool enough to cut himself upon it. No sooner had he spoken them than he was struck by the absurd image of his severed limb being brandished like a trophy; pain lanced through the wound as though calling to the memory of when he was whole, so sharp that it would have brought him to his knees had he been standing. Bent double and grasping at his shoulder, trying to breathe until he steadied, he didn’t see the curling of Ilberd’s lip.

Raubahn had scarcely caught his breath, and already Ilberd charged again, readying a new challenge to whet his anger like a gladiator sharpening his blade before battle.

“The Warrior of Light has gone missing since that most unfortunate evening,” he said in a cold drawl. “Tell me, brother. What do you know of her ties to the Resistance?”

Raubahn looked up, frowning. “She lives in Little Ala Mhigo. That is all I know.”

“Do you really know so little? Even I managed to learn she was one of their fiercest captains on this side of the Wall before she became Eorzea’s champion. You might know that if you were still one of us,” Ilberd said sharply. “My informants tell me she hasn’t made contact with the Resistance since she disappeared. She held out far longer than you did before she gave up on our homeland.”

“You are an even greater fool than I if you truly believe she would endanger her people by letting this mad plot follow her to the Resistance,” Raubahn sneered, his voice grinding like salt. “Or that she is capable of giving up.”

Ilberd’s eyes were sharp—those of a raptor tearing through a sun-warmed carcass in search of its innards. Raubahn didn’t know what it was he meant to find.

“I suppose it’s only a matter of time until she takes the fall for the sultana’s assassination—seeing as she’s already a fugitive,” Ilberd said, drawing closer and glancing at the stump of his left arm. “Why send her away? She could have fought for you.”

Raubahn’s laugh was bitter, and not at all a laugh. “You overestimate her loyalty.”

“Do I? I rather saw you as birds of a feather, preening and strutting in your newfound fame. Though I suppose she is not as fond of kneeling as you are,” Ilberd added almost thoughtfully.

The fetter around Raubahn’s ankle had seemed so heavy when he first tried to move, still trembling from the worst of his ordeal, that he hadn’t realized it was little more than an afterthought. His remaining hand was unbound, and the single chain bolted to the far corner of his cell was the only thing that held him—what little was left of the Bull of Ala Mhigo barely merited proper restraint. It might have shamed him to think it and to know that it was more than enough as he stood and stumbled, but his tired rage sparked like a nearly dead flame.

He launched himself at the bars, growling, his fingers clawing at Ilberd’s throat. And Ilberd put himself in his reach, let Raubahn’s hand close around his windpipe and press against his pulse with the dregs of his strength. It felt like being alive again, to even think of choking the life from Ilberd, to make him pay—

Ilberd reached calmly through the bars, fingers curling in Raubahn’s tunic, and _pulled_. Raubahn’s left shoulder smashed against the bars, his knees buckling at the pain that burst through him like a cannon blast. For a moment, he lost himself; when he regained his bearings, he was on his knees, his hand gripping the bars to keep himself from falling, and his throat was raw.

“Maybe you can swing from the gallows side by side. Like old times.”

Ilberd stepped back, straightening his coat. Something like panic gripped Raubahn, unbidden, at the thought of Ilberd walking away, leaving him in the dark again with nothing but his agony and his rage and his grief.

“Is that all you came here to do?” Raubahn said, bringing himself to his feet again. His body felt like another man’s: too weak and yet so heavy that a wave of dizziness gripped him. He couldn’t ask himself whether he would ever fight again; he had to. “Gloat? You already resemble your masters.”

Ilberd smiled, letting a sharp breath out through his nose. “I suppose you would know, old friend,” he said, and turned to walk away. He paused when Raubahn said his name.

“Have a care, Ilberd: Morgana Arroway does not take well to betrayal. If I don’t kill you, she will.”

“Perhaps she will,” Ilberd said calmly. He kept on walking. “Or perhaps I will take back Ala Mhigo for all of us—deserving or no.”


	4. 2.0 ― UL'DAH

“I need a favour,” Morgana said, her body and voice taut with discomfort.

Former gladiator, renowned sellsword and adventurer, champion of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn—and she couldn’t bring herself to meet Raubahn’s eyes as she said those words. In fact, her gaze settled firmly beyond his left ear, and she spoke like ice had settled somewhere in the hollow of her chest.

And maybe it had. The last nineteen years had hardened her into winter stone; that she should come to anyone for the explicit purpose of seeking help seemed as possible as a mountain uprooting itself and moving somewhere sunnier.

“A favour?” Raubahn repeated disbelievingly.

Morgana sighed. “I know I haven’t got any right to ask when I’ve been considering our debts paid for a long while now, but I really do need your help.”

“My help—personally?”

As he asked, Raubahn couldn’t even be certain what it was about the possibility that was so surprising to him. What did he expect—a request for the help of the Flames? A meeting with the sultana? Morgana was far too proud for that.

She wrinkled her nose.

“Who else?” she said, impatience creeping into her tone. She didn’t enjoy prolonging this moment. “There isn’t a single person in this sandpit of a city trustworthy enough to ask.”

“I shall endeavour to prove myself worthy of the trust you put in me,” Raubahn said unenthusiastically. It was so close to sarcasm that Morgana actually looked at him, as though seeing him for the first time—and he did not know whether he regretted or appreciated it. Having her look at him always provoked a strange ache from deep within his chest, but the absence of the fire that burned within her left him cold.

“I wouldn’t go that far. You’re honourable, is all, for better or for worse.”

She did not say that she could never trust him so long as he served Ul’dah before the Resistance, but Raubahn heard it all the same—because he knew her. He hadn’t forgotten.

He chuckled, low and almost rueful. “Fair enough. How may my honour serve you, then?”

“I want to know who killed my brother,” Morgana said, like the sharp fall of a blade. She held Raubahn’s gaze; kept a close watch on the shifting of his surprise, the frown settling on his brow. Her eyes watched the world like a beast in the wild, a gladiator on the sands locked in a duel. “If I’m going to be hunting Gaius van Baelsar, I want to come out on the other side without unfinished business—”

“Morgana…”

“You bought the Coliseum,” she pressed. “Surely—”

“I could tell you where I buried Gotwin’s body instead,” he said, gentle in his gravity—but it still struck Morgana like a concealed knife she never saw coming.

A second passed, then another—long enough that Raubahn almost regretted it. Morgana swallowed back the tremor that threatened her voice and spoke with ice again.

“Excuse me?”

“Have you forgotten? The night you left, Gotwin’s wife—”

He reached for her name, and the failure of his memory tasted bitter on his tongue. Morgana could only be resentful as she came to the realization that he’d forgotten, but it soothed her, too; she expected it of him, and this proved her right. There was no rancour in the way she supplied, “Havisa.”

Only grief, thick and heavy and choking.

“Havisa asked me to see to his remains and I swore to you both I would,” Raubahn said, and he didn’t need to say that he had kept to his promise. Morgana knew. “Would paying your respects at his grave not give you more peace than seeking revenge?”

“Don’t tell me how to feel,” Morgana snapped. “I don’t want peace. I don’t want revenge. I’ve left a blood debt lurking in my shadow too long and I want to see it paid.”

“Nothing more than that?”

“And nothing less,” Morgana said, lifting her chin in defiance. “They tried to have you killed, too—or have you forgotten?”

“You know I haven’t.”

Still, she went on, all sharp teeth and ready claws: “They dragged you to the sands in chains and they tried to put you down like a dog when you chewed your way out of them. The Coliseum was festering long before we ever got there.”

Raubahn shook his head and broke away from her gaze for the first time. “And I cut away the rot, Morgana. I did everything I could. No one will have the power to do what was done to your brother again, not for as long as I hold the Coliseum.”

“Can you really be certain of that? You who told me not so long ago that you can barely even help the sultana to hold onto her own power with the Monetarists circling her like bloody sharks?”

“No,” Raubahn said sharply. “There is no certainty in this city, and you know it as well as I. Should I lay down and wait for them to slit my throat, then? Death would be certain.”

Morgana raised her eyebrows at him for lack of a retort. With a breath, Raubahn let the edge that had settled into him grow dull once more, trying to lessen the pull of tension in his shoulders. She had a way of bleeding into him that he didn’t understand, even if he knew the familiarity of it like a rival’s tells.

“I can’t help you,” he said at last.

Morgana’s expression darkened almost instantly. “Why?” she asked, and lodged in a threat as he opened his mouth to speak: “If you tell me it would damage your political standing, I’m going to stab you.”

“I can’t give you vengeance—or help you settle this blood debt, or however you would call it. I can only give you names.”

“That’s all I want. I never said otherwise.”

Raubahn shook his head once more, looking her in the eye. “You don’t want ghosts,” he said, because he at least understood that much about her. “But it’s all I have. The man who had your brother killed, Athelred Stone, was part of a gambling ring. Five years past, I arrested him myself; he was found hanged in his cell days later.”

It wasn’t justice; not even close. When Roaille had made the report to him, Raubahn had been so enraged that he’d made a complete mess of his office. She had helped him put things back in order without speaking a word, but there was no putting that man’s death right.

And he knew it could only draw far more blood from Morgana than it had him. He watched her frown deepen, her hands curl into fists at her sides. Her anger was rarely silent; that it should manifest thus now felt like watching roiling seas from behind a window. Like lightning flashing through the sky without the chorus of thunder to answer it.

“You said names,” she said after a moment. “Who else? Whose hand held the knife?”

“Red Mercy.” A gladiator who was already a veteran of the sands by the time Morgana and Gotwin came to try their chance in the arena. “I killed her in a bout a few years after Gotwin’s death. I didn’t learn of her part in your brother’s murder until later.”

All this time, Morgana had stood near the door to his office, as though she were loath to even step foot inside. Now, she came forward on unsteady feet and let herself fall into the nearest chair, slumping with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands.

“It always knew it was senseless,” she said quietly, a rasp of salt and suffering. Her foot shot out, kicking the leg of Raubahn’s desk so hard his inkwell nearly fell over. “He never mattered—none of this ever mattered. Why did it have to be so fucking absurd?!”

Raubahn had no answer; he never would. Slowly, he moved closer to her. He reached out, but stopped himself before he could touch her shoulder.

“Gotwin is interred near the Sepulchre, on the western rise,” Raubahn said, his voice careful. His heart broke for her as keenly as it had the night she’d left, wild-eyed and broken and marred by her own brother’s blood. “I marked his grave with a black stone. It’s still there.”

Morgana looked up, her face absent of tears—but wetness clung to her lashes. She stood, running the back of her hand under her nose with a sniff, and didn’t look at Raubahn again; only that vague spot above his left shoulder.

“You’re a good man,” she said, and then she was gone. Raubahn didn’t know whether she believed it.

That night, she built a pyre for her family where Gotwin lay, alone and silent. Raubahn didn’t see her again until the morning of Operation Archon, and she stood as tall and immovable as the mountains that gave the Peaks of Gyr Abania their name.


	5. 3.2 ― ISHGARD

It should have come as no surprise to Morgana that a rogue was best placed to find her when she didn’t want to be found, but it still unnerved her when Thancred did. He made no effort to quiet his steps and gave her an easy smile when she rolled her eyes at the sight of him, turning her gaze back towards the embrasure without so much as a greeting; he’d long since learned not to take it personally.

“What are you doing out here?” he asked, leaning his arm against the top of the little alcove where she’d settled down in the front of the tower at the Gates of Judgement. 

Morgana had had to sneak in, but the knights who passed by her on their rounds no longer jumped at the sight of her—they merely stared as long as they could without breaking their necks and walked away. At the very least, they were polite enough to be discreet about it.

“I was going to kill the little lordling if he stayed in my presence one more second,” she said.

Thancred smirked. “And you already came so close.”

“Don’t remind me,” Morgana muttered grimly. “I’d rather not have to be a fugitive again this year.”

The mere thought of the debacle at the Falcon’s Nest still made her grind her teeth; it had taken every last onze of Alphinaud’s persuasion skills to keep her from dropping everything and going back to Little Ala Mhigo. Let them finish their bloody war themselves or drag it out if they didn’t know how else to exist—she’d done enough. 

“Better not get too comfortable, then. You might graze a Temple Knight on accident during the melee and get us run out of town,” Thancred said, ducking down to squeeze himself into the alcove with her.

Morgana shoved at him like the irritated sibling she had once been. “Exactly what do you think you’re doing?”

“It’s cold out here. It won’t kill you to sit with our knees touching.”

Thancred wriggled to make himself comfortable, deaf to Morgana’s condemnation of him as a child, and gazed out of the embrasure with a faraway expression falling over his face. Morgana had always figured his bluster for an act, at least in part—now, she saw how quickly his smiles fell away and knew it for a fact.

“Is that the delegation from Ul’dah?” he asked, looking out into the highlands. As he spoke, he extended a hand out towards her along the wall, the small slip of parchment between two of his fingers hidden from view by their knees. “News from home,” he said quietly.

Morgana said nothing and leaned her head against the wall to look down at the note, her mood souring even further as her glimpse of brutal hope faded away as quickly as it had come.

“We’ll find him, Morgana,” Thancred whispered, and the words seemed so practiced that he must have said the same to Alphinaud. Almost immediately, he spoke again—this time in his usual upbeat tones. “Our friend the general’s looking rather well, isn’t he?”

Morgana hummed a wordless assent and made an effort to sound thoughtful about it. She felt like the fool she had been all those years ago at the Coliseum—worse, now, because she was meant to have more sense at her age than she had then. She couldn’t help but see her attention pulled towards Raubahn, still towering over his party even after the ordeal he’d endured, and she hadn’t from the moment she spotted the Ul’dahns making their way through the snow.

Her silence had Thancred drumming his fingers on the side of his knee. “Did you know I’ve seen you fight him in the arena?”

“What?” Morgana asked, her attention snapping to Thancred. “Truly? You can’t have been older than—”

“Fourteen. This was before I even came to live in Ul’dah—I’d been sent on an assignment from Sharlayan. Everyone wouldn’t stop talking about the bout, and I was frivolous and eager,” Thancred said with a smile. Morgana elected not to comment that he was still frivolous. “It was an incredible spectacle; I don’t think I breathed for most of the fight. And I didn’t even know which side I was cheering for.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this when we first met? You would think this is the first thing you’d say—” Morgana said, and worked up her best mimicry of Thancred’s most charming voice: “‘Can you imagine, fair maiden, that I witnessed your greatness upon the bloodsands many moons ago? You are as breathtaking today as you were then, screaming and covered in sand and blood. Surely it is fate that has brought us together again.’”

Thancred laughed. “My advice, Morgana: leave the poetry to the bards.”

“I don’t need poetry to get women to enjoy my company.”

“Twelve,” he said, clutching his chest and miming the act of pulling a knife from his breast.

“I mean it, Waters,” Morgana said. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Believe it or not, I was wise enough not to even attempt to seduce you. I saw who you were that night, and saw it again when we met—not someone to be trifled with.” Thancred gave her an earnest smile, completely devoid of artifice. “And I’d heard what happened to your brother; I operated on the assumption that you might not take kindly to being reminded of that time.”

“That… is surprisingly decent of you.”

“I do have some hidden depths.”

“So deep that one might even think you have none,” Morgana said, her comradely insult greatly lacking in enthusiasm. Thancred was right: every reminder of Gotwin’s death had the effect of a dagger, even after all these years. The very idea that he might have simply heard the story through gossip made her want to hit him—and that was with the restraint of appreciating him somewhat. “How did you learn about it? Some tavern rumour on Pearl Lane?”

“Raubahn told me the story, actually—years ago. I was having a drink with him, and I said I’d seen him fight. I must have made some remark about you and your brother, because when I first came to Ul’dah after seeing you, no one ever spoke of the Griffin’s Talons. No one knew what had become of either of you; like the sands had just conjured you out of nothing and then taken you back without a trace.”

Morgana smiled bitterly. She had done nothing but resent the sands all these years.

“But he remembered,” Thancred went on. “Spoke rather beautifully of you and your family, in fact—and that was before half of Eorzea would fall over themselves to sing your praises. He said it was one of the reasons why he bought the Coliseum rather than walk away.”

“How very noble of him,” Morgana said flatly, though she already knew this.

She hadn’t forgotten their conversation in the frenzied few days before the assault on Castrum Meridianum—not when she had somehow managed to make it into more of an argument than a conversation. She had done everything she could not to think of it since, but it lingered at the back of her mind like a haunting. Raubahn had spent years and coin he won with his blood trying to make things right, and he had done it in the memory of her family’s suffering.

She didn’t know if rescuing him from Halatali would ever be enough to repay that debt. Without Ilberd—without revenge—it would never feel like enough.

“Will he be all right to fight, you think?” Thancred asked, peering out of the embrasure once more.

 _I don’t know,_ Morgana almost said. The truth was that she dreaded seeing him on that field—seeing him diminished. And for what? Another man’s bitterness? For the twenty years that had already tried to break them time and again? It felt wrong.

“Of course he will,” she said instead; she had to believe it. “He’s the Bull of Ala Mhigo.”

And she was right.

With all the champions of the Alliance having arrived and all the preparations for the melee finished, a rare sun shone over the highlands as if in answer of the anticipation that reigned over Ishgard. In the strangest, softest way, it reminded Morgana of the thrill of the arena—without the sense of bitterness and loss. For once, it felt liberating to head into a battle knowing that the worst injury might be scrapes and bruises and wounded pride, just as she’d felt heading into the gladiatorial bouts that were arranged by lanistas who wanted a show without risking their investments. 

The only thing that cast a pall over her pleasant afternoon was the incessant pull of wondering if, across the field, Raubahn recognized the feeling as she did—that, and Emmanellain’s incessant yapping off to her right. But Morgana could drown him out, and she let herself be content.

She tugged on the straps of her pauldron, checked the knot of the sash of bright Ala Mhigan fabrics—her only token from home—that she wore around her waist. Gotwin had always fidgeted like this behind the gate where they stood before every bout; she wasn’t certain when she’d picked up the habit.

“Are you certain you won’t don—” Aymeric began, as polite as could be.

“Even I ain’t wearing Ishgardian colours,” Hilda said brightly. Young, always vibrant and wholly uncompromising of her nature; Morgana appreciated no one in these lands like she appreciated that girl. “She’s already doing us enough of a service by fighting in our name, so leave her be, m’lord.”

“You’ve already as good as won the whole thing for them,” Thancred muttered from behind her. Lucia directed an icy glare at him, so he patted Morgana’s shoulder and stepped even further back. “Well, good luck, Morgana. Try not to kill anyone.”

“Try not to sprain anything talking,” Morgana said.

She stepped out onto the snow, and the glare of sunlight on swords blinded her for a blessed moment. When the horn sounded, her blood began to sing.

The melee was beautiful, jubilant chaos: blades crossed, shouts rent the air—orders and battle cries and cheers rising to the heavens—as the ranks broke in the mess of it. Magic came in bursts of light, turning the wind warm with both healing and destruction.

Twice Morgana faced Pipin and earned bruises on her forearms with her ill-timed blocks—the boy was quick and unrelenting, fighting with a weight behind every strike that unmistakably hinted at the source of his training. He fought like a gladiator and a soldier, his feet steady in the snow as though it were sand. And he did not look over his shoulder out of concern for his father once, so Morgana did not try to find him across the battlefield.

For once, she kept to her allies. When a towering Roegadyn broke and ran for Hilda, intent on hindering her line of fire, Morgana crossed his path and slammed her sword down into the snow, knocking him off his feet. She fought shoulder to shoulder with Lucia while Hilda shouted laughing insults at half the Alliance, then blazed through the battlefield again to stand on the frontlines.

And the Fury’s Gaze found her. Morgana felt the tether at her back like a fabricated whisper of the Echo’s power, its light and colour clear behind her. She searched the field for the other tether, and her gaze fell upon Raubahn—a titan in black, the visor of his bull helm raised, his own eyes finding her across the battle. She couldn’t stop the spark of elated laughter that left her lungs.

“Form a line on Morgana!” shouted Aymeric. His voice had knights falling in front of her, ranks closing as though to stand against a dragon, weapons poised to defend her.

Morgana simply lowered her guard and her sword both.

“This ain’t over, hero!” Hilda yelled from behind her, her words punctuated by bursts of gunfire. 

“I know,” Morgana said, and waited for the knights’ vain attempt to pass.

She watched Raubahn wait for the assault that inevitably came, knocking down Aymeric and his knights without discrimination—or much effort—until the field was clear. Morgana hefted Tizona’s twin onto her shoulder as Raubahn slammed his own blade into the ground: flames burst forth to cradle them both, the world hidden away behind the fire.

And Morgana found herself smirking.

“It’s been a while, Morgana,” Raubahn said with a smile—as if the last few months had never happened. Or perhaps because they had, and still they both stood here. “I was hoping it would come to this.”

“Is this your way of asking a lady to dance, General?”

“When I know it is her way.”

Morgana heard Aymeric curse and Pipin shout orders beyond the flames, but the confused din was merely a distant orchestra, meant to fade away.

“Shall we?” Raubahn asked.

“Lead on,” Morgana said, lowering her sword from her shoulder to grip the hilt with both hands. She raised her guard and waited as Raubahn slammed down his visor—looking upon the bull as she once had on the sands. As he took up his sword, she let the smile that lingered in the shadow of his helm sink into her mind.

Morgana charged without hesitation—though she did not strike with the same abandon to the surety of battle. No part of her life had ever taught her to hold back, and it seemed to her at times that she had come into the world raging for a fight; still, she pulled strength out of every hit, left Raubahn far longer to recover than she ever would have anyone else.

His expression was lost in the shadow of the bull’s head, but the lines of his mouth drew downward as he blocked a slash that dinged almost daintily on his sword. Two breaths later, Morgana was on her back with half a mouthful of dirty snow, shaking the stars from her eyes.

“I thought you said you’d only gotten better with age,” Raubahn said, standing back rather than press his advantage. He would never be satisfied with such a victory. “Are you injured, or will you give me a real fight?”

Morgana felt a twinge of shame, but she didn’t apologize. Words were nothing; she rolled to her feet and stood as a gladiator looking death and glory in the eye, and she gave Raubahn a real fight.

She gave him everything. All her speed, all her strength—everything but her rage, because in this blessed moment inside the flames, it had pulled back like a tide. She gave every taste of her blade, took every bruise, fought the dance that they both needed. Raubahn made a fool of her for thinking he might be anything less than he ever was, and she was grateful for it.

They fought until Morgana’s arms ached, until her legs trembled and her breath was burning in her lungs, sweat trickling down the hollow of her spine. Their swords crossed once more, and with the last of her strength, Morgana pushed forward to crash her pommel into Raubahn’s jaw. He staggered; she swung to disarm him, pulling back as Tizona fell into the trampled snow. As soon as Raubahn’s knee touched the ground, Morgana’s blade was at his throat.

“I told you,” she panted.

“Aye,” Raubahn said, lifting two fingers in surrender. He was grinning up at her as he lifted his visor, the flames fading away. “I yield.”

Morgana barely heard the cheer that rose, at first tentatively, from Ishgard’s forces at her back. She didn’t turn to them to drink in their ovation like a victor on the bloodsands; she merely held her hand down and helped Raubahn to his feet. His fingers lingered on her wrist as he stood close, his skin hot against hers—and his gaze, too, grey embers fixed on her. Morgana’s whole body burned, weary and thrumming with the thrill of it.

Her eyes touched his mouth; she opened hers to speak, and then Emmanellain was shaking her shoulders and bouncing beside her.

“Victory, old girl! Taste the sweetness of victory on the air!”

It took everything Morgana had not to punch him once and for all. Raubahn let go and stepped back, clapping her on the shoulder.

“Go on and celebrate your victory, my friend. It is well-deserved.”

They shared one last dizzy, breathless smile. Morgana let the boy pull her away—back towards Ishgard, towards its grave grey stones and into the slow fading of daylight.

It was a misery and a half to sit at the victory feast Aymeric hosted to celebrate the presence and participation of the Alliance leaders. Morgana had left a perfectly good party at the Forgotten Knight with Hilda already deep in her cups and clinging an arm to her shoulders, and weary as she was from the fighting, she still would have preferred being caught in the middle of a good-natured shouting match between Hilda and Thancred to this.

Some clever bastard had seated her across from Raubahn—whether in honour of their now-famous duel a few hours past or in recognition of their shared homeland, she didn’t know—but these rich men’s tables were so bloody ridiculous that they may as well have sat on two different ends of the room. In Ala Mhigo, it wasn’t a proper meal unless you were knocking elbows with your neighbour every time you reached for the arak.

The worst part of it all was that Ishgard had no wine strong enough to justify the nagging, incessant impulse scratching at the back of her mind to leap across the table and do something wildly improper.

It was still passing strange to see Raubahn in such a setting; he was meant for it no more than she was, and somehow, it was something he’d chosen—as he had his son, a bright young thing with all the easy confidence Morgana knew she would never see in her own flesh and blood. He had chosen his sultana like she had chosen the Resistance when she had nothing else. 

A few months past, she might have believed the worst of him, but she couldn’t bring herself to resent him any longer; she was too stubborn and too contrarian to willingly share Ilberd’s belief that Raubahn had abandoned their homeland.

The night of the banquet plagued her memory with shaky rememberings—but one that remained clear to her beyond the horror and the betrayal was the vice marshal of the Immortal Flames, unshaken despite the danger to his father, telling her that he’d been stationed on the Ala Mhigan border. And he’d said it like he knew her, like he knew that she would understand that Raubahn had never given up and that he’d charged someone he trusted like no other to watch over his homeland.

And maybe Pipin did know Morgana far better than she knew this boy she’d never met, of whose existence she’d never even been made aware. _Father speaks of you often._

Morgana could only sit stiffly in her chair and try to pick the right fork at the right moment, biting back every question she wanted to ask of Raubahn while he handled this stuffy affair with far more ease than any born warrior should hope to have. She made it through the whole feast without exchanging more than a handful of words with him, and it made her feel like she was slowly sticking pins under her skin.

When Raubahn stood to take his leave, Morgana’s heart dropped. Like a child, she didn’t want him to leave her there.

“I’m afraid I must retire; it seems I do not recover from the hardships of battle as easily as I used to,” Raubahn said with an easy smile that skirted on the edges of bashful.

All those present knew of his injury and imprisonment; no questions were asked of him, and no one made any attempts to have him stay. He exchanged a glance with Morgana, too short to be noticeable and yet too long for her to keep herself from wondering what it meant. It made her feel like a fool.

“Shall I send Lucia to accompany you, General?” Aymeric asked.

Raubahn opened his mouth to protest.

“The first commander should be able to stay and celebrate Ishgard’s victory. I’ll go,” Morgana said—and blessedly, it did not sound like she’d blurted it out nearly as much as she felt. “Seeing as I’m partly to blame for putting him in such a sorry state.”

Pipin laughed, leaping to his father’s defense with all the goodness of his nature. “Not that sorry.”

“A state that I share, Marshal, make no mistake—neither of us are spring chickens. I think I’ll end my night with sacks of ice on all my joints,” Morgana said.

Her own grace surprised her. The others laughed, because they all thought the Warrior of Light unstoppable and infallible; she weathered the praise the Ishgardians had for her in parting and finally extricated herself alongside Raubahn. The wind was biting on her cheeks, and she realized that perhaps the wine had been slightly more effective than she’d judged—if only by the measure of her flushed skin.

But she felt utter clarity far beyond the influence of the wine.

They walked in silence long enough to suitably distance themselves from Borel Manor—or rather until Morgana had simply had enough. She grabbed Raubahn’s wrist and pulled him off the street, pinning his shoulders to a wall of dull grey stone to kiss him like a storm. The surprise drew a feeble grunt from him, but he didn’t hesitate—not for a moment—and kissed her back with the same force, his touch burning at the side of her neck.

“I’ve been wanting to do this since this afternoon,” Morgana muttered against his lips, fingers curling into his cloak. The spark of his body against hers was so vivid that she didn’t even think to be embarrassed for how short her breath already was.

Raubahn’s thumb brushed against her jaw. “I’ve been wanting to do this since the last night you left my cell at the Coliseum.”

A beat passed as shock struck Morgana.

“You can’t be serious,” she said, because it was the only thing she could say. She knew he was neither a liar nor a vapid charmer the likes of Thancred, but she still—

He kissed her parted lips like he meant it, knocking the breath from her lungs as though they were still in the ring. And she found herself believing it, too, in the hungry press of his mouth against hers and the heat of his body on her skin.

But the cold was a knife. Morgana didn’t want to touch him to keep herself warm; she would rather touch him because she wanted him.

She pulled back, lips brushing along his jaw. “I have a room at the inn.”

“I thought you were a guest of House Fortemps.”

“You wouldn’t be wondering if you’d met any of them," Morgana said, tucking her hands against Raubahn’s sides. “And I have no desire to parade you through their halls like some brazen conquest.”

He laid a heavy gaze on her, trailing down her mouth and neck, and gave a nod. His breath was quick and white on the air. Morgana stole one last kiss before dragging herself back into the street, conspicuously flushed and readjusting her clothing.

Below the spires and the endless stairs, the heart of the city was bursting with life: the night fires blazed, and the people shouted and laughed even as the hour grew late. For once, Morgana was glad for the familiarity her time in Ishgard afforded her; she took the quieter streets where the stones would think nothing conspicuous of two brawny Highlanders walking side by side.

They enjoyed the anonymity until they walked into the hot air of the Forgotten Knight. Morgana didn’t know what she’d expected.

The party made up of Hilda’s watch and those common enough to be comfortable with disinhibiting in such proximity to the Brume were, for the most part, no longer steady on their feet. In her rare and brief moment of mortification, Morgana spied Thancred slumped over a table and possibly weeping—or giggling to himself; it was hard to tell by the way his shoulders shook—but Hilda was still bright-eyed and standing, if slower. And she raised a cheer in Morgana’s name the moment she saw her at the foot of the stairs.

“The hero returns! Come on, Morgana,” Hilda slurred, her cheeks tinged pink. She reached over a young woman Morgana vaguely knew as Hilda’s fellow machinist, grabbed a bottle, and slammed it down on the table nearest to Morgana. “The evening’s still young! And we ain’t—” she shook Thancred’s shoulder to no avail— “done!”

Hilda’s gaze fell on Raubahn, and some wild smirk began to spread across her lips. Morgana strode over and leaned in close enough for Hilda’s breath to make her eyes water.

“I will give you a thousand gil to shut your mouth and make certain all of your friends do the same.”

Hilda narrowed her eyes at her. “Five.”

“Three.”

Hilda draped her arm over Morgana’s shoulders and stared at her for an untenably long moment. Then she shouted, “Morgana’s payin’ for the next round, lads!” and pressed a wet kiss to Morgana’s cheek, winking at Raubahn over her shoulder.

“Do me a favour and drink some water, sweetling,” Morgana said as the tavern erupted into a fresh burst of elated noise.

It proved to be enough of a distraction. They slipped away on steady enough ground to hope avoiding a scandal, and with enough noise in the tavern to mask the hurried slamming of the door—and what came after.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i originally intended to cut out the third portion of this chapter to keep a consistent tone, but 🤷 i think we will all need it with what's coming.
> 
> thank you to everyone who's read, left kudos and commented thus far! you can also follow me on [twitter](http://twitter.com/vulpinewood) for updates and commentary, and screenshots of morgana's arms.


	6. 2.55 ― THE BLACK SHROUD ― UL'DAH

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning: minor use of sexist language in dialogue.

The young ones died.

It was the way of the world, and Morgana had long since learned to swallow the bitterness of it. What other choice was there? At twenty, she had watched former schoolmates come back as mangled bodies from the Ilsabard border after serving in the mad king’s army. At twenty-five, young and old all around her were massacred by the magitek that rained death from the skies as the Empire fell upon the ruin of Ala Mhigo’s civil war like vultures on a rotting carcass.

And in the two decades since, she had seen it all: teenaged fools murdered by Brass Blades for taunting the wrong man on the wrong day; scrawny children dying of hunger and illness and poisoned water. Mothers burying their children who were of an age with her own. Morgana herself had done her fair share to keep the horrors of this world unchallenged; she knew she had killed green would-be soldiers in skirmishes for the Resistance, played the executioner on the bloodsands for the benefit of a screaming crowd and coin-lords on young fools whose only crime was to have been weaker than the gladiator before them.

None of it was right, and there was no accepting it—not for her—but Morgana could harden herself to it. People died; they kept dying, and the young ones died just as unfairly as the rest.

But when she saw Wilred’s body in the water, she fell apart.

The wound in his belly, the sword out of reach of his lifeless hand, the unmarked shield—they gave all the answers Morgana would possibly want, and still it wasn’t enough. She fell to her knees beside him, soaking her trousers with icy water, and gripped a fistful of his bright blue jacket with a shaking hand.

 _He’s only a boy,_ Morgana thought dimly, barely aware of the tears that pricked her eyes. She laid her forehead against his chest, listening to the silence of his heartbeat. _He’s no older than my boy._

As if in answer, the bloated, bluish grey clouds let loose a rumble of thunder—and the crackling of lightning that streaked down the sky made her jump, striking at the bonds that held her anger. Morgana turned her face up to the heavens and screamed herself hoarse.

“SHUT UP! I know! I know I couldn’t protect him!”

The Destroyer saw; he always did. He always heard. While his people suffered, he burned the sky. 

Morgana wanted to raze the world. She wanted violence to match her rage.

Another boy with shoulders too narrow to bear the weight of his homeland, of the suffering of his kin—dead in a place teeming with life, so close to the home he’d never seen with his own eyes. The Wall so close in reach, and he hadn’t even died fighting for his home. He had died alone fighting for a world that only wanted him because he fought.

The anger at the pit of Morgana’s ribcage couldn’t reach past the hollow of fresh grief; all she could think of was that Wilred deserved to be held one last time.

She sat with him while the storm raged around them, smoothing his hair back from his brow and singing a lullaby from home. Her own mother had never been soft enough to sing it, but she had heard it from Havisa’s lips, and sung it to Sairsel in turn. 

Wilred did not cry in her arms. He lay as silent as Gotwin had—a young father to hold in the sand, a boy to hold in the water. And Morgana carried him, as she had Gotwin, back to Little Ala Mhigo. 

She brought him to the only home he had ever known, knelt by the only place he had ever prayed. The stone in the caves that bore Rhalgr’s comet was as silent as it had always been.

“I’m sorry, my friend,” Minfilia had said before they left for Ul’dah together. She’d taken Morgana’s hand in hers, and Morgana had only known that the shock of Wilred’s death still lingered in her body because her skin was ice against Minfilia’s. “I know this celebration is no way to mourn the ones we lost. We need only lean on each other tonight, and then we can take the time to properly honour our friends.”

Morgana had no words that were not blades to hold between her fingers until they tore her own skin to shreds, so she said nothing and merely held Minfilia’s hand.

She wanted anything but a celebration—anything. And she remembered just how much the gods loved to laugh when they let her have her wish. 

After holding a dead boy in her arms, she watched a girl fall. That was all she saw when Nanamo began to claw at her neck: not Raubahn’s precious sultana, not a pawn, but a girl. And Morgana rushed to her side with shaking hands, utterly useless without a blade in her grip—but the coin-lords would ever find a use for women like her.

She knew she’d been played for a fool when a mob of Brass Blades poured into the room before she’d even opened her mouth to call for help.

“Assassin!” gasped Teledji Adeleji, the perfect picture of shock. Morgana wanted to run him through. She stood and stumbled away from the sultana’s body, the blossom of anger hardening her shock into silent stone. “Ala Mhigan scum!”

The Brass Blades closed in. Morgana reached for her sword on instinct; with men in those masks drawing in, after all those years in Little Ala Mhigo, it was the only thing she could do. But they weren’t stupid: they knew her, and they had no desire to throw themselves down on her blade. 

Or they were merely stalling for time. That, too, Morgana understood too late. Despite everything, she was still fool enough to reach for hope when she saw Brave blue. When Ilberd broke through the Brass Blades’ ranks to reach her, she readied herself to fight—back to back with him, as they had faced the Ivy and her imperial dogs, together as comrades— 

“Surrender, Morgana,” he said quietly, weighting his words with the point of a dagger at the small of her back. “Resist, and you’ll only give them an excuse to call you a savage like the rest.”

Morgana gritted her teeth as reality sank with poison to fill her lungs. Not him, not after all the things he’d said, he couldn’t— Anyone but him.

“Better a savage than a traitor,” she spat.

“So speaks the viper of vipers,” said Teledji.

Morgana’s fingers tightened around her sword. She breathed quick fire though her nose, watching the blades turned towards her: how many could she take with her before they cut her down? Ilberd touched her sword arm and held out his hand, a silent urging to surrender.

“I only need my own eyeteeth to end you, Ilberd,” Morgana said. She loosened her grip on her sword, dangling it from her open hand but not letting go.

“Were those your words to the Black Wolf? Did you tear him apart with your own two hands for burning our home?” Ilberd asked. “Or were you content to simply let a pile of rocks take revenge for you?”

Morgana growled and tossed her sword to the ground, as far from the soldiers as she could. Its violet blade gleamed like the griffin standard in sunlight; it felt like a piece of home. She refused to put it in Ilberd’s hand. A Brass Blade and a traitor Brave scrambled for it, and Morgana sidestepped, stomping down as hard as she could on Ilberd’s foot. Pain cut through her skin as his knife blindly slashed at the elbow she meant to crash into his face.

“Seize her!” Teledji shouted; two men caught her arms, and the schemer left her to his thugs.

Morgana thrashed as Ilberd took the honour of binding her for himself, shouting her throat raw with insults—each more pointless than the last. She was trapped like a raging storm chained to the sky, and if anyone heard her beyond this chamber, none came.

They let her wear herself down. Before long, her whole body ached: the tension burned her flesh and her muscles and locked her bones, the thrill of the fight twisted inside her as she stood powerless. Her grief pushed in behind her eyes, a slow dagger piercing her heart ilm by excruciating ilm. The rope already chafed her wrists, and the blood from the throbbing cut above her elbow was sticky on her skin.

“Tell me why you’re doing this,” Morgana demanded, her breath burning through her lungs. “Make me understand why you would turn on your own in service of these bastards who have grown fat on our blood.”

Ilberd was pacing by the door in front of her—calm in a way that turned her blood cold. His back was straight, his shoulders settled into certainty. But the hot steel was inside him. It was in his bones, too.

“You are not my own. No longer.”

“You think you get to pick and choose? Who do you bloody stand for?”

“I stand for Ala Mhigo,” Ilberd snapped.

The two Braves holding Morgana had lessened with her diminished struggling; when she jolted forward, she almost got free. Their grip dug bruises into her arms.

“You think you’ll see Ala Mhigo freed if you put me in chains? If you hand the fucking Monetarists my head?” Ilberd said nothing. His silence sent a roar of anger through Morgana. “I took you for a brother, Ilberd! You are the one who turned against your own—remember that.”

He kept pacing. He kept his head high.

“Look at me, you bloody wretch!” Morgana yelled. Ilberd only glanced at her, but it was enough. He was looking into her eyes as she spoke. “Steorra would be ashamed.”

Retaliation came as swiftly as she’d expected—a comet streaking through the sky. Ilberd’s fist crashed just below her ribs, precise and vicious, crushing the breath from Morgana’s lungs. Pain burst through her, but it was nothing next to the animal panic that snatched all the sense out of her mind as she gasped for air like a drowning woman. She knew by the cold that she was on her knees, but it took an eternity for clarity to return with her breath.

“Speak her name again, Arroway, and I will find your bastard and—”

“Captain,” said one of the Braves after a burst of noise beyond the doors. “Teledji called.”

Ilberd grabbed a fistful of Morgana’s hair to make her look at him, both staring into a mirror of rage, but he said nothing as he hauled her to her feet and dragged her through the doors. The absurd theatre of the night still needed them all to play their parts—and Ilberd played his well.

It was all Morgana could do to swallow a strangled yelp as he threw her down at his feet before the gasping crowd. Pain shot through her shoulder, her hip, her knee. Her mind raced as she scrambled to sit up with her hands bound behind her back, barely hearing the accusations Ilberd made of her.

Raubahn’s gaze found hers, horror-struck in a way she’d never seen—not even when she’d screamed that she would kill him all those years ago, in her grief for Gotwin. Morgana had to fight the instinct to look away, but she held his gaze and gritted her teeth.

“What have you to say for yourself?” Ilberd asked, as if it mattered.

Morgana didn’t declare her innocence. She didn’t beg Raubahn to believe it. She simply turned her gaze back to Ilberd and said, “Fuck you.”

And her part was done. They stretched the farce as far as it could go, and the crowd shifted like a tide closing around her, blocking her view as Ilberd played the compassionate friend; Morgana heard Raubahn’s grief before she saw it.

 _We have all lost too much not to gain something here,_ he’d said to her, almost twenty years ago. So young, then, already scarred and nearly broken as they all were. He had lost too much, and he had done everything he could to build something. He had gone on to love, the way Morgana struggled to love even her own son.

And now the bastards had ripped that girl from his hands, rooting her out like a weed.

Nausea roiled in Morgana’s belly as Teledji gloated, and she fought a wave of dizziness as she tried to stand, to launch herself at him—she could do something, anything, if she only reached him, but someone pulled her back.

She could barely see past the thick of the crowd watching the bizarre spectacle unfold. Raubahn’s rage echoed through the room as though he stood on the bloodsands again, his black swords gleaming in the yellow light. But what Morgana did see as the blades sliced through Teledji was not the Bull of Ala Mhigo; it was the wounded man under the helm who had once seemed to her like the horns gored him worst of all. They were both still the same—still angry and brokenhearted, breathing through knives and the fresh wounds they left without cease.

Morgana would have killed, then, to step through the growing slick of Teledji’s blood and fight at his side once more. The traitor Braves and the Brass Blades held fast while chaos drove out the gathered civilians, keeping a tight watch on her and the Scions; she had no chance. From the ground, she looked for gaps in their guards, for weapons she might reach, for—

At the last second, she saw Ilberd move to put himself in Raubahn’s path in a flash of blue. She didn’t have time to yell a warning. She could only flinch when a hot spray of blood hit her face, sitting in shock as Raubahn screamed and bled.

Rage drove Morgana again, sending her to her feet; the room spun, but it was nothing. She dodged the swing of a blade as Minfilia called her name, drove her shoulder into a Brave’s chest hard enough to hear a crack, ignored the pain. She broke a Brass Blade’s nose with her foot when he left himself open to charge at her—maybe more than that, because an old monk had taught her well; the Blade collapsed. What little fight she could rip out from this moment, bound and helpless as she felt, she did.

The sword that had fallen from Raubahn’s left hand lay so close in reach—a dark beacon on tiles stained with crimson. Morgana didn’t know what to do when she reached it, but she knew she needed to. And she almost did.

She dropped to her knees as a blow hit the back of her legs, sending her crashing down to the floor with no hands to catch her.

“Stay down, bitch!” the man spat. “Don’t make me cut your throat.”

They were bold enough words, but they were weaved together by dread. Morgana snarled as she pulled herself up.

“You couldn’t kill me. Not even if you tried for a hundred years.”

She needed his pride stronger than his fear. _Untie me. Show me how man you are._

Morgana waited one breath, two breaths. Raubahn and Ilberd fought hard enough to shake the very earth—two fires burning with rage and grief, ever familiar. But Raubahn was leaving a trail of blood in the wake of his every swing.

And then her last guard fell with a wet gurgle. Raubahn was behind her; his blade touched her skin, slicing at her bonds.

“I never doubted you,” he said, breathing hard. “Not for a moment.”

The words hit Morgana like a blow. All she could do was leap for his fallen sword, its weight making her tired arms shake. But she gripped the hilt with both hands and raised her guard. That was when the Scions began to fight, too.

“Y’shtola! His arm!” she yelled.

“You have to run. All of you,” Raubahn said.

“I’m not leaving.” Morgana fell in at Raubahn’s left, ready to fight. Ilberd opened his arms as though welcoming them both to him. “I’m not letting the bastard win.”

“I’m asking you to do this for me. For Nanamo,” he said, and his voice nearly broke.

Y’shtola ran forward with magic at her fingertips, Yda and Papalymo standing as a barrier in front of them.

“I’ve stanched the bleeding, but he needs a chirurgeon.”

“Raubahn,” Morgana said through gritted teeth.

He stepped in front of her. “Fight for her like I laid Gotwin to rest for you.”

Another blow. 

Minfilia laid a hand on her arm, beginning to pull her away.

“Go!” Raubahn shouted.

And Morgana ran, horror and shame nipping at her heels like a hungry hound, with his blade in her hands. She ran for the rest of the night.


	7. 3.0 ― 3.4 ― THANALAN

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter features mentions of my friend [livvy](https://onwesterlywinds.tumblr.com)'s character ashelia riot, ala mhigan founder and leader of the free company the riskbreakers. leofric snakesbane is a joint creation who originated in [this brilliant piece](https://onwesterlywinds.tumblr.com/post/149678804949/swapping-tales) of livvy's.

Sairsel brushed the sweat out of his eyes, blinking away the sting of salt and sand. The sun was beginning to crest towards the rusty mountains, telling him in silence that he was already late. He’d tracked the antelope almost all the way to the edge of the Twelveswood—hours of silence, of letting the unrelenting heat soak his clothes through with sweat, of tucking himself out of the beast’s senses. In all his years hunting, he had never known the singular exhaustion that came from knowing that all his efforts were barely worth more than a single raindrop in a lake; the antelope would add little substance to the settlement’s stores.

But it might fill the children’s bellies, and that was enough. Sairsel puffed out a hot breath, already eager to feel the cool night winds pick up, hauled the antelope over his shoulder, and began the long trek back to Little Ala Mhigo.

Leofric was waiting for him at the mouth of the mesa, standing under the battered griffin flag and trading dirty looks with the Brass Blade on duty. There was a rare tension settled in his shoulders that entirely rid his face of its usual smug lines, and that alone was enough to set Sairsel’s teeth on edge.

“Sairsel,” he said as soon as they were close enough to speak without shouting. “The old bear wants to see you. Right away.”

The whispering ghost of dread at the pit of his stomach turned into a full-blown haunting. The last time Gundobald had summoned him personally, it had been to tell him that Morgana had gone missing and that the Brass Blades considered her a fugitive from the law—mere hours after she’d brought Wilred’s body home and given her son the motherly advice of keeping his grief locked away from even his own heart.

He couldn’t keep himself from thinking of the worst: his mother dead in the cold wastes of Coerthas, far from home and in service of a war she had no true desire to fight. The thought alone was enough to make him want to retch.

Sairsel opened his mouth to ask—to at least shorten the torment of his own anxieties—but the Brass Blade beat him to it with his suspicion: “Wha’ about?”

Leofric’s eyes slid up towards the heavens. He looked like he was weighing the likelihood of getting a lance to the gut if he told the Blade to piss off.

“It’s Mhigan business,” he said, far from courteous. “Is it still within the purview of Gundobald to tan the sprat’s hide for pissing away the better part of a day ‘hunting’ only to come back with one starved goat, or would you rather pull his breeks down and do it yourself?”

The Blade’s lip curled underneath the shadow of his mask. “Can’t be arsed, thank you.”

“A Brass Blade who keeps his mitts off our youths. What a day,” Leofric said, sarcastically lifting his hands towards the sky in one last act of defiance—not nearly as smug as it should be—before turning his gaze to Sairsel. He beckoned him inside the mesa with a quick jerk of his head. “Come on, Arroway.”

Every member of the Resistance in Little Ala Mhigo learned quickly enough to know exactly when and where the Blades and the Flames were listening; as soon as they were out of earshot, Leofric put his hand on the back of Sairsel’s neck and whispered close to his ear: “You ain’t in trouble.”

Sairsel dropped off the antelope carcass and felt no lighter for his dread, but he was silent as he followed Leofric deeper into the mesa. He had been shocked, at the beginning of his time in Little Ala Mhigo, to see how far the tunnels went—though few were inhabitable—but they no longer held any secrets for him. A few of the Resistance fighters called him a sand fox for the uncanny sense of direction he’d expected to lose in the desert and that, blessedly, had not left him. Sairsel rather liked the moniker; it was marginally better than ‘knife-ears.’ At the very least, no one had called him that for some time now.

Before long, he found himself in a cramped, quiet corner of the mesa with Gundobald and two of Morgana’s Scion friends—Papalymo and Yda, a Highlander girl whose father had been friends with the old bear in their homeland—and being asked to escort the two to Castrum Oriens that they might make contact with the Resistance in Rhalgr’s Reach.

Rhalgr’s Reach. It sounded like a great, beautiful thing—some promised land, some place of comfort and action that the Resistance on this side of the Wall spoke of only when they were cloaked in utmost secrecy. It had taken Sairsel an absurdly long while before they’d even dared speak the words around him, even with Morgana for a mother, and it still seemed just as distant now as it had the first time.

Rationally, he knew that crossing the Wall was feasible, if not dangerous: Little Ala Mhigo was in regular contact with Rhalgr’s Reach, though not nearly as often as Gundobald liked, and some units changed sides of the Wall every now and then. Sairsel hadn’t forgotten Meffrid, the captain he’d helped out in Quarrymill long before he ever imagined finding his mother’s path; one of the first things he’d done after he joined the Resistance was ask after him, only to learn that he’d since departed Thanalan having brought his people to safety and returned to Rhalgr’s Reach.

Still, it seemed an insurmountable challenge.

“I—” Sairsel said, wanting only to speak as the long seconds stretched following Gundobald’s offer of assignment—even if he struggled for the right words. “You’re asking me?”

Gundobald’s mouth stretched into a thin line that disappeared beneath the rampart of his moustache. “Is Snakesbane the ranger who grew up in the Black Shroud?”

Leofric snorted at that from where he stood with his back turned to the others, guarding the entrance of the grotto. Sairsel rubbed the back of his neck, resentful of his own nature—an uncertainty which did not relent even now that he was aware of it. Perhaps it was worse. 

“Er, no. It’s only— I’ve never done this before. We have people who do this. I’m _good,_ but…”

“Hylde is injured and Cedrik almost got caught the last time. I can’t be certain whether the imperials saw his face, so I would rather not show it near the Wall for a while. Now is as good a time as any to have you learn,” Gundobald said. He glanced at Yda. “And when Morgana returns, you will be able to tell her you saw her friends safely past the Wall.”

Sairsel blew out a breath that puffed out his cheeks. “All right.”

“Think of it as an escort—nothing more. You guide them through the Shroud, make certain they go unnoticed, and you trade them off to the squadron from the other side who will get them through the tunnels.”

“And it’s not like we’re _entirely_ helpless,” piped Yda. She was cheery enough, but the dirt and blood Sairsel had noticed darkening her fingernails when they shook hands spoke volumes, and they both looked exhausted. “We can fight and we know the Twelveswood well enough.”

“Not as well as me,” Sairsel said, the words leaving him before he could realize how arrogant they sounded. Strangely, Gundobald smiled.

“And we are clever enough to know when we need help,” Papalymo said. “Or, at least, one of us is.”

Yda crossed her arms with a huff, and Gundobald went on to give the rest of the details of Sairsel’s assignment while the Scions bickered in whispers. There was no time to waste; they would leave at first light.

Sairsel settled in his bedroll that night still shivering from the sweat of the day’s exertions that clung to his body even after the cold had settled—but most unnerving was the weight at the bottom of his ribcage. Always more dread; it was familiar, an enemy he was forcing himself to learn to coax into a friend, but there were days it was simply stifling. Still, he dreamed of the Twelveswood; he dreamed of home, of its sun-dappled paths and the familiar language of the whispered winds that fluttered through the trees.

It wouldn’t let him down. He could do this.

Weeks had already passed by the time Yda and Papalymo returned to Thanalan—and by then, when Sairsel was sent to make contact with them in the Twelveswood, everything had changed. On the surface, Little Ala Mhigo was much the same as it had been the day he first came with the air burning in his lungs, but the Resistance had never been on the surface in the first place. They were deep waters to navigate, with currents he’d learned to weather, if at times clumsily. Now, a tempest was stirring.

The Masks seemed to have sprouted from the sands like desert flowers, angry and bright with determination and yet still like a whisper on the wind. It was in times like these that Sairsel especially enjoyed his capacity for relative invisibility; a few moons past, he could have never imaged fading into the background again, what with the eyes that always seemed to follow him for being Morgana’s son and a forestborn stray to boot, but novelty always faded. He liked to believe he’d proven himself, too, and could simply be one Resistance fighter amongst many. As the Masks grew into a proper faction, he faded. He listened.

He listened, and it made him nervous. Without his mother, he had no real allies in the Resistance, pitiful as that sounded. His unit under Leofric’s command were good enough comrades, but with the Masks, nothing felt certain anymore. They kept tight ranks even among their brothers and sisters throughout Little Ala Mhigo, and the elusive firebrand who called himself the Griffin operated on a level of paranoia that went far beyond the secrecy Gundobald and his people had employed for the last twenty years. 

Once, Sairsel entertained the thought of seeking out Ashelia—but that was the impulse of a naïve boy in need of reassurance. More than ever, the lie he’d given Morgana of breaking his ties to the Riskbreakers seemed absolutely necessary to maintain. He didn’t dare involve anyone on the outside, though he wasn’t certain what it was he needed to protect. Himself? Ashelia? She didn’t need protection, and least of all his—but she had enough on her plate without having to suffer for his blunders. Was it the Resistance itself he ought to protect?

Alone, he had no answer. He felt like a broken compass.

When he met with Yda and Papalymo, they seemed like the closest thing Sairsel might have to some direction. He told them everything he knew of the Masks when they camped in an old ruin in the south of the Twelveswood, their words blanketed by a heavy, near-constant rumble of thunder. Mhigans saw every sign they could when lightning struck, and he was beginning to think that perhaps their superstition did have some weight.

“We need to tell Morgana,” was the first thing Yda said after mulling his words for an uncharacteristically long while. Whatever the Resistance in Rhalgr’s Reach had done during her time in Gyr Abania, it had stripped away some of the paint. It was like seeing a glimpse of the real Yda behind the mask.

“She’s still in Ishgard. If I thought it was a good idea to chat with her about this over linkpearl, I would have done.”

“Do you think these Masks are so dangerous?” asked Papalymo.

Sairsel huffed out a breath. “I don’t know. It isn’t like I can say there’s a civil war brewing within the Resistance, but they’re growing and the Griffin is… well, I haven’t seen people believe in the cause as fiercely as they’re starting to since he showed up. I have a bad feeling about this, is all.”

“Does it sound like tempering to you?” Yda said quietly, pulling her knees to her chest as she looked at Papalymo.

Papalymo’s expression darkened, thoughtful; he didn’t seem certain whether he wanted to entertain the possibility or not. The sky let out a low roar.

“They’re not ensorcelled,” Sairsel said. Yda’s theory sent unease burrowing into the hollows of his spine. “They’re people starved of hope.”

“I pray you are right. In the meantime, we will keep an eye on aetheric readings around Little Ala Mhigo,” Papalymo said. “And we try to make contact with Morgana. Discreetly.”

The two of them were outsiders, so Sairsel let them take the risks that he could not afford. He watched, he listened, and he waited. And, despite the weight of his apprehension—or perhaps because of it—he got bolder.

The last few days before Morgana reemerged in Little Ala Mhigo were agony. Sairsel could barely sleep under the weight of the silence to which he kept after his last outing to the Twelveswood—the action of a foolish and brazen boy—and his own vigilance for the knife that he feared might come in the night. And he was afraid, too, of his own inaction.

Seeing his mother unraveled him, and he knew when he looked at her that he saw the only way forward. The one reason he hadn’t gone to Gundobald or Leofric or Yda and Papalymo.

But the Warrior of Light never went unnoticed, and least of all by her people. She deserved a proper homecoming, now that she had freed herself from the needs of Ishgard and its people, and Little Ala Mhigo gladly gave it to her. Sairsel hung back as he always did, watching her face and the line of her shoulders to try and divine meaning from them of how she might feel. Morgana had a gift for masking her vulnerability: he found a vague sense of weariness in the way she held herself, but it only went as far as that of a traveler rather than a woman whose fate exhausted her beyond comprehension.

Sairsel hated to burden her further, to give her even a glimpse of his own vulnerability—to prove to her that he was just as forest-soft as she thought him—but the nameless urgency had settled too deep, and it moved him. When Morgana’s gaze found him, he made his way to her without hesitation, coming to a stop at arm’s length from her.

Morgana nodded. “You look well,” she said, her hard gaze gauging him.

What did she see? Sairsel desperately wished for an answer, but he couldn’t ask it. Not now. He forced himself to move forward again and wrapped his arms around her shoulders, stiffening just as much as she did at the contact. It felt wrong—like they had lost too much to ever come close to something like this.

“What are you doing?” she hissed, raising her hands but not touching him.

“I need to speak to you alone. Urgently,” Sairsel whispered.

Morgana understood. Her arms slowly encircled his middle; whether the gesture was genuine or for appearances, she patted his back. “I’ll signal you.”

They parted awkwardly, and Morgana moved on as quickly as she could, barely sparing him a second glance. Her years in the Resistance had taught her a great deal about secrecy, but stifled as he felt by her presence, Sairsel couldn’t help but wonder if her distance was simply the product of the seemingly irrecuperable schism between them.

Still, he was a hunter, and what his life had taught him was patience. He waited until Morgana’s signal came: an order, given to him by Leofric, to head out towards Zan’rak and scout ahead for any threat of Amalj’aa or Flame patrols. She found him where the plains were flattest, the mountains distant and the land bare—a place where sun and wind were relentless, where none could hide. Openness was their protection; they couldn’t shield themselves, but there would be no prying eyes or ears that they could not see for malms.

“What is it?” Morgana asked without preamble. “Make it quick. I told everyone who could hear that I was on my way to meet with the twins for Scion business.”

“I did something stupid,” Sairsel blurted out; not a great start, even if it was how he felt about the entire affair. Morgana raised an eyebrow at him, and he puffed out a breath. “Yda and Papalymo have told you about this whole Griffin business, haven’t they? I heard Alphinaud asking questions. Not at all subtly, but that’s by the by.”

“We agreed not to be subtle on purpose. What’s your excuse for being stupid?” She paused, looking uncomfortable, then added: “By your own description.”

“Well, I went and listened to him speak a few days past. We’ve been keeping an eye on the Masks, Yda and Papalymo and I, but it’s frustratingly hard to learn anything about them, so after it was done, I… I shadowed him. The Griffin.”

“Fool of a boy,” Morgana breathed, concern passing over her face like someone else’s shadow. “Did he see you?”

“I haven’t gotten stabbed in the kidneys lately, have I?” Sairsel said. He fidgeted with the wraps around his hands, fingers slipping under them to touch the scars on his palms. “It got easy. Do you know why? Because I followed him to the Twelveswood. The Twelveswood, Morgana.”

“Your territory.”

“Aye—and the way to Baelsar’s Wall, too. That’s where I thought he was going, but I ended up in Rootslake, and I saw— The man who’s been stirring up everyone in bloody Thanalan isn’t the Griffin. He’s a double, and he was meeting the real Griffin.”

“Hells.”

“Why go through so much trouble?”

Morgana breathed out through her nose. “Did you see his face?” she asked. Of course he hadn’t. “Hear him speak?”

“I did, but—”

“Describe it.” 

Sairsel frowned, but obliged her: “Ala Mhigan accent. Thick. Deep voice, I suppose, but it sounded… cold. Like steel.” He hesitated. “Like yours.”

Something in Morgana shifted, beyond wariness and into something like dread. She ran a hand through her hair, pressed her fingers hard against her mouth, and exhaled a trembling breath. At first, Sairsel thought—with all the shock that went with it—that she might be afraid.

“Bastard,” she said quietly, and it was as she turned and shouted her rage into the wind that he realized it wasn’t fear at all. “Bastard!”

 _I’m right here,_ Sairsel almost said, but his mother did not have the look of a woman in the mood for jests. Instead, he said, “Are you… all right?”

“No. No, I’m not bloody all right.” Morgana clenched her fists. “If I’m right, the Griffin is the cowardly fuck of a traitor who murdered your friend Wilred.”

Wilred’s name pierced Sairsel’s breath as swiftly as an arrow. He stood silent for a moment, then gathered himself and spoke—but his voice sounded small and unsteady.

“How do—how do you know?”

“When I told you to keep an ear to the ground for any mention of Ilberd Feare while I was in Ishgard, that was who I meant. You weren’t the only one the Scions and I had looking out for him since I got Raubahn out of Halatali,” Morgana said, her gaze distant. They’d barely spoken when she stopped in Little Ala Mhigo on the way to her rescue; she was a fury then, silent with anger, and Sairsel was seeing it again. “We may as well have been looking for a ghost this whole time, and now some radical comes trampling over the Resistance’s ground out of nowhere, hiding his face and suspicious to the point of having another man speak in his stead—and he talks of liberating Ala Mhigo like we haven’t been bleeding ourselves dry for that goal for twenty years? I’d know that arrogance under any guise, Sairsel. Mark my words.”

Ilberd Feare. If Morgana believed him to be Wilred’s murderer, that was enough for Sairsel—and he’d been fool enough to almost believe in the Griffin. Instinct had kept him safe, but he still felt ashamed to have let himself be so nearly swayed by pretty words and passionate promises.

He looked down at his feet. “There’s more.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“He met with a man in white robes. I couldn’t see that well, but I think he was wearing a mask, too. Red.”

Morgana swore. “Ascians. Of course they’re bloody involved. What did they speak of?”

Sairsel did his best to relay what he’d heard, but it had made little sense to him and he remembered actions far better than words. “He gave the Griffin Nidhogg’s eyes. Went on about how he was chosen to wield their power.”

If Morgana looked as though nothing could shock her anymore, the storm that stirred inside her at the revelation was, for once, unmistakable. She said nothing for a long while, and Sairsel didn’t dare break her silence himself.

“I have to go and find the twins. When you’re done scouting, give your report to Leofric and tell him to let Gundobald know you’ll be working with the Scions for a while. I want you for this Griffin business.”

Sairsel blinked, unable to contain his surprise. “I will.”

“We’ll be meeting the others outside of Zahar’ak at nightfall. Be there.” 

Morgana gave Sairsel little time to answer before she walked away. His answer didn’t seem to matter; still, he spoke like a good Resistance fighter, because it seemed more like an order than simply a mother’s request.

“Aye, Captain.”

“What you did was reckless and foolish,” Morgana said, but she slowed her steps before she passed him and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Good work.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next up: baelsar's wall. godsspeed, everyone. i can't wait for you guys to see this one.


	8. 3.5 ― BAELSAR'S WALL

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning: minor use of ableist language in dialogue.

Morgana had once believed her rage to be complete. She had held the flame of it between her hands for twenty years; it was a familiar feeling, a familiar weapon built brick by brick. And for Ilberd, she gladly wielded it: she clutched her hatred until the light of it spilled from between her fingers, stoked it that it may become a blaze. She had nurtured it in the waste left behind by his betrayal and let it fill the space within her after he slipped from her grip in Halatali.

For once, she had let her own anger lull her into believing that the fates had reached the height of their depravity—and she had been wrong.

Ala Mhigans were broken upon the Wall, dying with Rhalgr’s name upon their lips as the Destroyer split the sky with light. Morgana willed herself blind to it in her climb, but her heart drank every horror and its well watered the fields of her resentment—for the Empire, for Ilberd, for her own failure in stopping the Griffin’s madness before this all came to pass.

Twenty years she had spent dreaming of the day they would take the Wall. Twenty years of imagining the battles it would take, the sacrifice; not once had it looked like this. Not once had she imagined that winning could look like loss.

Morgana’s insides twisted as she reached the top and saw the highlands spill out on the other side of the ramparts. The storm’s dark clouds had parted, and the moon touched the mountains with silver. In the distance, a spire stretched even higher than the peaks; Morgana knew that the shadow of its flag was not the proud griffin that should fly over Gyr Abania. 

For an instant, hatred warped her senses, pulling at the haunting of Hydaelyn’s blessing: _I will see Ala Mhigo freed and pay the blood price to the last drop if I must._

It was not her voice that echoed through her mind, but the feeling lay heavy inside her. Morgana shook herself free of the brief stupor that threatened to lock her in place and turned away from the view of her homeland, throwing herself back to the mercy of the fight.

She would have fought through every hell in the world to face Ilberd again, unwilling to see or understand that she already stood in hell. Not until she reached the airship landing.

The platform was a perfect circle like the arena at the very center of the Coliseum—only its ground was not sand for warriors to hold sacred, but cold Garlean metal awash in light. The Griffin stood at one edge as a gladiator waiting for opponents to pour in through the opposite gate, but his back was turned and the lone griffin on the crest of Ala Mhigo flew upon his cloak. He was no gladiator, and Morgana was no more the Griffin’s Talons on her own than he was a loyal man.

But he may as well have stood upon the sands, for he wore the mantle of executioner well—his people were dying in droves below, and on the platform a few steps away from him was another fool whose only crime was to have been weaker than him.

In the seconds where her anger gathered like a storm at the sight of Ilberd in his mummer’s armour, Morgana barely saw the motionless shape as more than that. Nameless dead, like the thousands who lay forgotten since the Empire crushed Ala Mhigo underneath its heel.

Then she began to recognize him: an outstretched hand wrapped in fabric that wasn’t archer’s gloves but the concealing of a painful secret, a pointed ear too small to be entirely Elezen. It was her son’s body that lay upon the platform, still and silent as death.

Something in Morgana snapped, so final that it seemed to drag her into madness. She let loose a roar worthy of a wyrm’s vengeful fury, her own voice ripping a tear through her chest.

“BASTARD!”

The Griffin turned. Morgana tore her sword from its sheath, gripping the hilt tightly enough to blister both of her hands.

“Take off the bloody mask, Ilberd! I want to look into your eyes when I carve the black heart from your chest!”

He obliged her. His eyes were colder than anything Morgana had ever seen—and yet they burned with a wrongness that should have given her pause. But she was beyond that. The storm burst through her; she sprinted across the platform and leapt, sword raised, to bring down an unforgiving cleave.

Ilberd’s blade met hers, his guard rising effortlessly. The sound of steel on steel should have been music, but it only rose in a cacophony under Morgana’s assault, with every relentless swing that drove her sword down. Her mind did not register the other Scions running onto the platform; every ilm of her knew only the fight and the violence of Sairsel’s loss.

She slashed scars into the gleaming metal of Ilberd’s armour, shattered its scales. She watched blood spill from his nose, so dark and red she could almost taste it. The carved griffin head of his pommel crashed into her chest and sent her sprawling back onto the hard metal of the platform. Her breath seared her lungs.

“I did not want to kill your lad,” Ilberd said, his voice hard and uneven. “But he is as stubborn as you, Arroway. He died that others may live—that Ala Mhigo may live again.”

“Shut your fucking mouth!” Morgana screamed as she dragged herself up to stand. _On your feet, gladiator._

“Sairsel yet lives,” Alphinaud called from where he stood crouched beside Sairsel, working magicks into the bloody gash in Sairsel’s chest. Morgana had never heard him sound so hateful. “I will not let him die. Everything you do, I will undo.”

“Do you truly think one less body will change what is already in motion, boy?” Ilberd sneered.

He opened his arms. Blades of pure aether burst with light all around the arena, pulsing as they reached for Morgana with fiery maelstroms. And above it all, Ilberd’s voice rose, as brutal as his blade.

“Wield your hatred, Morgana! I put you in chains and crippled our brother. I cut down your son—make me an offering of your desire for vengeance!”

Darkness rose from beneath Morgana’s feet to quench the flames as she roared and locked blades with him again. The crystal she had taken from the corpse in the Brume answered her more keenly than it ever had before. Her body was alight with pain, but it was in service of her. Her anger. Her suffering.

_Hers._

She stood at the precipice, and she threw herself into the abyss without fear—in a heavy, thirsting swing of her sword.

Ilberd would have died. Should have died. Morgana would have cut his chest open, held what remained of his broken heart in her hands and crushed it.

Power robbed her of her vengeance, drinking greedily. Morgana felt it rise around Ilberd in the instants before their blades clashed one last time, but not even the threat of it would have stopped her; only the power itself did. Ilberd’s sword tumbled out of his hand, and before Morgana could finally, _finally_ rend his flesh, a red burst of energy blinded her and threw her onto her back once more. The metal of the platform met her hard enough that she thought, for one black moment, that it had split her skull.

Ilberd held Nidhogg’s eyes in his hands like a triumphant statue, his very soul gnarled and twisted around them like the putrefied roots of a long-dead tree. Yda shouted something, but Morgana heard her voice without words. The darkness in her, the one let loose by the dead man’s crystal, seemed to call to the power of the Eyes. Her own aether slammed against the confines of her body as Ilberd’s voice took shape within her, every word digging blades into her heart.

_I shall gladly become a demon. I will call upon a deity more terrible than the very black wyrm of the Calamity itself._

The dead called. The darkness called.

Ilberd shouted her name.

“Come to your death! Give yourself to our homeland if you truly have the will for it!”

Morgana’s head spun as she pushed herself up to stand—she had never lain down to die. Her feet dragged her for all the stumbling steps it took to reach the edge of the platform, to bring herself closer to the spire upon which Ilberd stood: his plinth, the ledge where his body might become a grotesque. He had put himself out of Yda’s reach, but not hers.

Revenge was still in reach. She only needed to leap, if she had courage enough to fall with him, to end this before it could turn into a horror worse than the screams of their brothers and sisters rising from below.

The sick glow of the Eyes painted Ilberd’s face in reddish light. He looked at Morgana one last time, no longer smiling like a madman—broken and drained of hope. Something in her shattered as he turned his face up to the sky and shouted—to the gods, to the Empire, to Ala Mhigo; Morgana no longer knew—his voice raw with rage and despair.

“My pain, my longing—you shall have it all!”

He let his body tip back to fall. Unthinking, Morgana jumped.

But her body did not answer. She could only fall to her knees on the platform as a lance of light pierced her from behind, her back arching with the pain that seized her. A scream tore through her lungs as the light ripped through her like a hand reaching into her insides and pulling her viscera towards the Eyes. 

Morgana barely saw the column of raw, bloodied energy that shot up towards the heavens, blinding, deafening the gentle hum of Hydaelyn’s voice. All she knew was the emptiness piercing her skull as she faded—and behind her eyes, the shape of Ilberd’s body inside the light, cradled by a chrysalis of black scales and bone wings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> END PART ONE.


	9. 3.56 ― THE BLACK SHROUD

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter features [livvy](https://onwesterlywinds.tumblr.com)'s ashelia riot.

_Hear. Feel. Think._

With waking came a harsh blossom of pain that dug deeper into Sairsel with every breath, and a limitless fog on his mind. Daylight touched his skin like a white-hot iron, but he barely had strength enough to flinch. He could only tip his gaze back as far as it would go; blurred as it was, he thought he saw a fat moon hang low in the blue sky through the window.

_What do you remember, child?_

Something within Sairsel answered. It sounded inside his skull like his own voice, but his lips would not move; his tongue was heavy in his mouth, his throat parched.

“Dalamud. Dalamud was in the sky again.”

_Not Dalamud._ The moon was pierced by blades of light from every side, locked inside a gaol of pure aether. It was no moon.

“I remember… I remember your voice. You were singing again—like you sang when Dalamud fell. I thought I was dying. I thought you were singing for me.”

_You are awake._

“It hurts.”

_Close your eyes and sleep once more. My voice will not fade._

Sairsel’s eyelids fluttered. When he looked at the blades stabbed through the moon, something inside him ached far deeper than the closed gash in his flesh. Something crawled through his blood, and he thought of the voice and wished he had strength to even weep.

His body sank. Sleep claimed him once more.

By the time Sairsel managed a proper grip on his own consciousness, his wound was little more than a raw, red line the colour of a young scar. He’d floated in and out of his own senses as healers and chirurgeons came to tend to him—though they had kept him on a sedative to lessen the pain and allow his body rest while the magicks did their work, so it may well have been only one of each order. Once, during a short bout of lucidity, he heard the Archon—Y’shtola, he forced himself to remember—explain to someone he couldn’t see that magical healing saved time and kept death at bay that could easily lay claim to a life without it, but that the body often struggled to keep up with the rush of being forced to put itself back together in this manner.

He didn’t know if he would suffer any lasting consequences, but someone said he’d been lucky. By then, he’d been too close to slipping back into sleep to laugh, but he could hear its bitterness inside him. Luckier than the dozens of dead Ala Mhigan youths whose voices seemed to echo from within the caged moon—too many whose names he’d known, who had called him ‘sand fox.’

Luckier than Wilred.

He was alive, and his body was whole—he wiggled his fingers and toes every time he awoke to make certain of it since he’d dreamed that his left arm wouldn't rise when he tried to draw his bow—and so, too, was his mind. He supposed it was. Still, some great gaping void sat at the bottom of his ribcage whenever he thought of what he’d seen as he lay bleeding on that platform, and the new, strangely familiar voice tried to fill the space. He didn’t feel lucky; only alive. He felt at a loss.

Morgana sat by his bedside for hours longer than was reasonable. She was alive, too, and had Sairsel not been so thirsty and weary and had it not pained him to even breathe for so many of his waking moments, he would have asked her if she felt lucky. Now that he was better, he figured he could ask, but he’d only started to feel comfortable lying on his side and it seemed insurmountable to roll over to face her and show that he was properly awake.

He barely knew how to converse with her on a normal day. Now, after lashing out at the Griffin like a wild beast with no sense of self-preservation and nearly getting himself killed while their world burned, he found he would rather stay in this uncomfortable death bed of a cot for a fortnight longer.

And he hadn’t even seen the look on her face yet.

The door opened, slow and careful. From a sliver of exposed metal on the wall, Sairsel could see a warped reflection of his mother where she sat facing his back, her form elongated and slanted; her position stiffened at the intrusion, then came loose like a knot. Soft footsteps edged inside, and the Flame General came into Sairsel’s limited view, a chair in hand as he placed it beside Morgana’s.

Sairsel had never met General Aldynn, but no one living in Little Ala Mhigo for more than a few days could swing a dead cat around without hitting someone ready to voice their opinion on their countryman who sat at the most important table in Ul’dah. There were those, especially among the Resistance, who resented his station—Morgana had been one of them before her unintentional rise to the esteemed position of the whole of Eorzea’s bloody champion had forced her to work with him—on grounds of morality or due to personal experience with the less pleasant soldiers among the Flames’ ranks. Still, even the ones who did so grudgingly agreed that he was a hero and a legend. Sairsel had wondered, once, if that should make a difference—Ala Mhigan hero or no, he was still one of the richest and most powerful men in a city that seemed to relish the suffering of his countrymen.

But seeing the man standing in his tiny sickroom somewhere in the Twelveswood was something else entirely, even if it was merely an uneven reflection. His towering frame stretched long across the mere few ilms of metal, and yet he deposited himself into the chair with the care of a man mindful not to make even the slightest noise.

“How is he?” asked the general, as though he knew him. His voice was deep, a gentle rumble in his chest, but he sounded exhausted.

They all did.

“Fine,” Morgana replied. She didn’t sound nearly as curt as Sairsel expected her to be—as she had been the last few times he’d heard her speak in this room.

“I’ve just returned from a council meeting.”

“So Alphinaud told me when he left here. He made a point of reminding me how sorely I would be missed. How did you all get anything done without my razor-sharp wit and strategic mind for solving every imaginable problem on this star?”

“You jest, but someone else with our talent for clubbing problems on the head until they disappear might have been useful. I was outnumbered by thinkers,” General Aldynn said. His words were meant to be light, but even Sairsel could understand he had no real heart for humour.

“What are they going to do? Have Thancred charm the primal to death?”

“You won’t like it. Nero tol Scaeva came to offer his assistance; he devised the plan.”

“He’s graduated to crashing Alliance meetings now? I’m going to snap that arrogant twig in half,” Morgana said—and this time Sairsel couldn't even tell if there was joking intent behind it. Knowing her, she probably meant every word. “What did he propose?”

“Cid is charting a course for Carteneau as we speak. They mean—we all mean to awaken the Omega Weapon to neutralize the primal.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“What other option do we have?”

Morgana said nothing to that. She merely leaned forward, shoulders bunching as she pressed her elbows into her knees.

The general was careful as he spoke again.“The Scions are making their preparations, but I think they would all join the Alliance in hoping that you will—”

“I won’t,” Morgana said, cutting and decisive. Then, more softly: “I can’t do this anymore, Raubahn.”

Silence crept over them like a stifling thief. The general reached out and touched Morgana’s wrist, then slipped his hand into hers—and she did not flinch or draw back. Sairsel had never seen her show friendly affection to any of her comrades, much less her own son; it was so strange to see her tolerate such contact that he found himself staring at a fixed point north of the sliver of metal.

He didn’t want to think of how weary she sounded, or how worn she had to feel to be letting this moment of quiet intimacy carry on without even the slightest twitch.

At a quiet rap on the door, General Aldynn drew his hand back and swiftly stood, keeping nearer to the foot of Sairsel’s bed. Once more, the door opened with a creak.

“Oh. I didn’t expect…” said a gentle voice. Ashelia, Sairsel realized with a pang of warm melancholy. He hadn’t even said goodbye to her before making for Baelsar’s Wall. “I’m sorry. I can return la—”

Sairsel almost turned his head to look at her and tell her to stay, but he was stupidly concerned that his mother would realize he hadn’t been sleeping all this time.

“No, please. I was about to take my leave,” the general said instead. Whatever goodbyes passed between him and Morgana did so in silence; Sairsel only saw his mother’s stiff nod. “Grand Steward,” he said to Ashelia.

“General.”

The door did not close behind him; Ashelia lingered in the doorway. “May I?”

“I’m not going to throw you out,” Morgana said flatly.

Ashelia shut the door and made her way over to the bed; Sairsel could only see a fraction of her reflection as she stood beside the empty chair, her head tilted to look at him. With Morgana sitting at the level of his shoulders and his hands out of reach, she had to settle for laying a gentle hand on his ankle. If Sairsel focused on her touch, he could almost feel the caring warmth of her hands holding his when they saw each other last.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how he is?” Morgana asked.

“I already spoke to the chirurgeon before I came in. I didn’t wish to burden you,” Ashelia said diplomatically, sitting down in the empty chair and neatly folding her hands in her lap. “Have you been able to speak to him yet?”

“Why? Should he have said something?”

Sairsel admired Ashelia’s patience; if Morgana’s curt words bothered her, she did not show it. “No. I only wanted to know how he feels.”

“He’s more likely to tell you than me,” Morgana said. This time, the ice in her voice wasn’t meant for Ashelia—and not for him, either, Sairsel realized.

“And still most likely to say nothing at all,” Ashelia added with a smile. It didn’t linger. “I need to be honest with you, Morgana: I didn’t only come here to see Sairsel.”

“Is that so,” Morgana said warily, not shaping the words at all like a proper question. Sairsel was growing irritated for Ashelia’s sake.

“I’ve spoken to the Alliance leaders. They say the cocoon won’t hold the primal much longer, and—”

“They’re going to dig up the Omega Weapon. I know. Are you really going to be the one to try and convince me to press the button myself?”

“I don’t particularly care to convince you, no,” Ashelia said honestly. “I’ve offered to take a small team of Riskbreakers to be the Scions’ reinforcements in Carteneau, should there be any threats. But I wanted to extend you the courtesy of deciding whether you wanted to be a part of this mission.”

Morgana turned her gaze away from Ashelia. Then she scoffed. “Why do you think I need your courtesy, Riot?”

“I can understand wanting to carry something out to its end when it feels personal,” Ashelia said, making a barely noticeable motion of her chin towards Sairsel. “I know a woman like you doesn’t become Warrior of Light by letting other people fight the battles she feels are hers.”

“A woman like me?” Morgana sneered. “Never presume to know anything about me again, girl.”

Sairsel had had enough. He sat up, so quickly his head swam and pain pulled at the scar on his chest, and spoke with his ragged, disused voice: “Don’t speak to her like that. You of all people don’t get to speak to her like that.”

Something strange fell over the room. Ashelia spoke Sairsel’s name, moving out of her chair; the bed dipped under her weight, and both of her hands closed around Sairsel’s. And Morgana sat still and silent, looking at him like a storm trapped her in her seat. At last, she stood, the chair scraping the floorboards as she pushed away from it.

“Do you wish to know how a woman like me becomes Warrior of Light, Grand Steward? It isn’t the fighting. It’s the Echo. Without it, I’m only another angry refugee or a dead body at the bottom of a wall. Mark me—they’ll all see it soon enough, and they’ll find another tool to play their games and end their wars.”

“What are you saying?” Sairsel croaked.

“It’s gone,” Morgana said, as though she were angry at the words themselves. She turned her fierce gaze to Ashelia. “Go to Carteneau and press the bloody button if you like. There’s always plenty of bodies.”

Morgana did not slam the door on her way out, but her sudden absence struck Sairsel just as sharply.


	10. 4.0 ― ISHGARD

Morgana pulled her furs closer around herself as she steadied on the cobblestones of the aetheryte plaza. She had seen milder nights during her time in Ishgard—and colder nights, too. The recent weeks since her return to Little Ala Mhigo and the Shroud had made short work of what little tolerance she had built for the cold, and the chill gusting down from the cloudless sky was quick to prove it to her.

She set off at a brisk walk towards the Brume, shaking off the strange guilt that pulled at her: it felt like a luxury she didn’t deserve to leave the near-constant bustle of Castrum Oriens, always busy with Alliance soldiers relieving others on watch and sweeping the Wall and the bowels of the castrum itself for any remainders of imperial forces. She’d had to sneak out and make for the aetheryte, telling herself that it would only be for one night.

A few hours in the Brume, and she’d be back in the Fringes by sunrise. She had no desire to linger in Ishgard after months of exile—especially not now that she could walk on the right side of Baelsar’s Wall.

But she needed this. She needed to fill the silence that kept her awake, the pulsing of power that plagued her nightmares with the feeling of being ripped apart over and over again. By now, she’d woken Raubahn in the middle of the night with that nagging need to be held more times than she was comfortable with; he deserved a proper night’s rest, perhaps more than anyone else in the castrum.

And if her instincts were right, she wouldn’t be alone in waking here.

As she took the familiar path down the wooden walkways and stairs, Morgana stopped by the spot where she’d found the corpse and touched the stone wall; the aether of the crystal sewn into her jacket stirred as though in recognition, a diffuse warmth pressed close to her heart. She cut the thought short when she began to wonder, as she had far too many times, whether the horror atop Baelsar’s Wall might have turned out differently had she stayed in control. Before she could think to apologize to the dead man she’d never really known, she turned away and carried on.

The young woman was exactly where Morgana expected her to be: standing at the edge of the city with a fire at her back, keeping her warm without cutting her from the winds and the harshness of the night. She needed the cold.

Silently, Morgana fell in beside the girl—she finally did look as young as she really was. Her hair was dyed a deep chestnut brown, pulled back from her face in a thick braid that lay against her shoulder; her clothing was plain and warm. Without tearing her gaze from the starry sky, she unclasped her hands to brush her fingers against Morgana’s knuckles in a silent, gentle gesture.

“It’s good to see you on your feet,” Morgana said quietly.

The girl nodded. “I am better,” she said, folding her arms together. “I am… free.”

“Have you gotten to work yet, then?”

“Ishgard heals apace—more quickly than I thought, in fact. It is difficult, but I am glad not to be alone in wanting peace to mean something to those who have suffered most.” The girl gave her the ghost of something that could almost be a smile. “I have you to thank for those introductions.”

Morgana waved a dismissive hand; she didn’t need thanks. Not for this. It was one of the only things she’d truly wanted to do out of the kindness of her own heart in all the time she spent in Ishgard—and she trusted Hilda to take care of this woman’s bruised heart more than anyone else.

“What are they calling you now?”

“Galanthine,” the girl answered with a ghost of a smile. She showed Morgana the simple embroidery on the cuff of her left sleeve: twined snowdrops circling her wrist, the white thread stark on the greyish brown fabric. “It was the children who started it. Because of my eyes, they said.”

“That’s sweet.”

“Are you all right, Morgana?” Galanthine asked keenly.

Morgana let a tired huff escape her lips, frost meeting the air. She had never had many words, and none of those she did have could shape how she felt. 

“Do you feel empty without her?”

“I felt lost,” Galanthine said after a thoughtful moment, her voice and words measured. She had time, now; without the war, the urgency that pulled at her soul was gone. “Lost and powerless as I had always been before I found her. But I cannot feel empty for having lost a burden that belonged to another—even being of my own making as it was.”

Morgana found herself gritting her teeth. Galanthine’s peace was a balm on her heart, but it only made her own war rage harder. She had always been selfish with her pain.

Galanthine watched her with her pale, piercing eyes.

“What happened to burden you so?”

Morgana wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry. For once, she wished that the power she feared would do the work of showing someone else the things she couldn’t bring herself to say. “It’s been torn out of me. The Echo.”

Galanthine’s shock came in silence. She turned to face Morgana properly, as though looking into her eyes might give the answers neither of them had. A frown settled over her features, her empathy all-encompassing.

“Do you not feel liberated?” she asked sadly.

“I wish I did. I’ve spent the last five years wanting it gone; I should have wanted nothing more. But all I feel is that someone else is wearing my insides.”

Galanthine lifted a hand, holding it close to Morgana’s chest. “May I?” she asked.

Morgana frowned. Anyone else, she might have struck for that, but she found herself nodding. Galanthine’s hand was cold, even though the layers of Morgana’s clothing, as she pressed her palm to the center of her chest. For a moment, they stood in silence as Galanthine closed her eyes. Morgana clumsily put her hand over hers, trying to warm her icy fingers.

“The same fierce warrior’s heart beats inside your chest, Morgana. The same light shines,” Galanthine said softly. “You were never a servant. You were blessed, but you were never Hers. I could see it from the moment I met you.”

“That’s a kind way to say I’ll be a stubborn cunt for the rest of my days,” Morgana said with a weak, half-hearted smile. Galanthine only shook her head.

“You know the faith I have in you. It did not spontaneously manifest out of the aether because of your Echo.” Her other hand touched Morgana’s arm. “All I feel is a current that has been diverted—it still flows within you. You are not empty, and you would not be even were it wholly gone.”

Morgana took a breath. She hated how her throat tightened, how emotion welled unbidden inside her. As she breathed out, she turned her face up and pressed a kiss to the girl’s temple, whispering into her hair so that not even the wind would hear.

“Thank you, Ysayle.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)
> 
> am i really writing for a final fantasy fandom if i don't yank their women out of the refrigerator and make them gay?
> 
> also: another bonus sunday update coming this week! i'll be taking a break from updating for the week of the 20th because my cushion of already written chapters is getting thinner and thinner so i want to give myself a bit of breathing room. thank you again to everyone who's been reading, leading kudos and commenting! 💚 you can follow me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/vulpinewood) for updates, commentary and, as always, pictures of morgana's arms.


	11. 3.56 ― THE BLACK SHROUD / BAELSAR'S WALL

“It’s done,” said Sairsel with a gravity that suited the pronouncing of a death sentence. “They activated the launch sequence.”

However this night would turn, it was a death sentence; Morgana didn’t need a linkpearl to Riot and her Riskbreakers’ operation to know this. Something or someone would die, and the only thing they all could do—the whole of the Alliance, it seemed, gathered at the foot of the Wall and in its vacant watchtowers—was to await the spectacle of death. Papalymo was already as good as gone; what remained was the question of who or what would join him. 

The primal. The weapon. More innocents, more fools. 

Morgana couldn’t remember the last time she had slept. She could only measure the passing of her wakeful hours by Raubahn’s presence at her side, his concern superseding duty and propriety—though no one had a mind to notice. Or perhaps it was she who barely made sense of the world around her. She felt fractured, a thing built on bones that didn’t fit. She felt hollow and haunted.

It got worse with every passing hour. Somewhere along the line, her grip on her anger had slipped, and a part of her that needed it like blood started to come apart. Every time she tried to look up at the cage that held the primal at its heart, the light seared behind her eyes.

She dragged her blunt nails along the sides of the scar just above her elbow, scratching red lines deeper and deeper into her skin, as she had been since nightfall.

“It’ll break free soon,” she muttered like some madwoman oracle. The line below her lungs fluttered, pulling unevenly at her breath. She wanted it to break free. “It won’t wait.”

_break the bonds break the cage fly_

_fly sink your teeth devour kill them_

_all_

 _kill them_

_destroy them make them pay_

_give them all freedom_

Sairsel looked at her like a gust of wind, like he’d been struck. Morgana didn’t know what he saw, and neither did she care; she barely even noticed to begin with. How could she? The light, the crackling of power inside it, the silent chorus rising—all of it flooded her senses, carved new paths inside her only to leave them empty.

Slowly, her words weaved their way into reality. The cocoon’s frame weakened under the relentless fury that drove the primal’s struggle, thrashing against the walls of Morgana’s ribcage. In the distance, there was no discerning the cracks that began to settle at the curve of the light; already the beast had won against the spell that held it. The lances that pierced the cage became brittle—but not first without leaving their mark.

Sudden as a bolt of lightning, the feeling shot through Morgana. Every single blade that had ever pierced her flesh stabbed her again, all at once, burying deep into her shoulder. The top of her thigh. The soft skin of her side. She did not hear herself scream, for her voice was silent under the wyrm’s roar as it pierced her skull from the inside.

The cocoon shattered, and from its broken walls rose wings of moon-white bone interlocked with sleek black scales that gleamed violet in the night.

All the pain she felt was hers and not hers. She knew it like a drowning woman knew water.

_this is how it feels_

_this is how it felt_

_every single day after day after_

_feel it take it home_

_our pain my longing_

_MORGANA_

The dragon rose into the sky as the cocoon burned away into the night, blazing and unfurling under a halo of pure energy—and the world below shielded its eyes while Omega gave chase.

Someone spoke her name. The primal burned with hatred, and horrible magicks began to rise from the violence of its life force. Her body moved; she launched herself with a growl at the nearest weapon she saw, gripping the hunting knife at Sairsel’s belt with fingers that were claws, and the blade slashed at him. Slashed the empty air.

She screamed and thrashed like a wild beast as light rent the sky only to part, struggling against the strong arm that restrained her. The dragon clawed through the night.

“Take the knife,” Raubahn ordered, holding her body against his best as he could. It only made her fight harder.

Bruising fingers around her wrist. A struggle in her body and in the sky, and her hand was empty.

“What’s wrong?” Sairsel said, but the dragon had no words. Her name, spoken again and again, in her ear and inside her bones. “Mother?”

The primal swooped low over the Wall _burn it down tear it down burn it all down_ and spun, wings outstretched, its silhouette clear against the sky. They all watched, wide-eyed, as the monstrous wyrm flew over them with the promise of ruination.

“Yiazmat,” Raubahn breathed. “By Rhalgr, he summoned Yiazmat.”

He jumped, his grip tightening on her as a fiery blast struck the bone armour of the primal’s breast. Her whole body stiffened as she let loose another scream, thrashing and clawing and struggling against the buckling of her own knees.

“MAKE IT STOP!”

Yiazmat flew upward like an arrow, unleashing a rain of comets onto the vague star that Omega traced in the night. They both were stars, immeasurable in their ferocity. In moments, the sky itself threatened to fall.

She fought less and less, her body giving to something closer to convulsions than animal struggle, as Raubahn kept his arm tight across her chest. He weathered the desperate scrabbling of her fingers and whispered against her hair, the chain of his words like a near-silent chant to guide her home.

 _I am mine and you are yours; I am yours and you are mine._ Old Ala Mhigan words of love. She hadn’t said them in a lifetime, not since she had promised to Saskia that she would say it every day of their lives if she wanted it—and for a moment, she held onto her senses long enough to wonder why it felt like only a handful of years. When pain ripped through her chest, it was with the rending thought of onyx black scales.

Further and further out of reach. Yiazmat’s wings beat out of time, and Omega left a trail of thick grey smoke over the stars. When they fell out of the sky, Morgana was on her knees and clinging to Raubahn’s arm like a child, her whole body trembling with every breath that shuddered through her lungs.

“Tell me it isn’t real,” she whispered as the fog parted from her mind. She felt like she’d fought a decade’s worth of battles, borne twice as many years of violence through every nerve in her body—all in the space of minutes. She stared up at the place where the primal had been caged. “Tell me it wasn’t real.”

“I can’t,” said Raubahn, his voice bereft of the surety that so often grounded it.

“It was real,” Sairsel said. He tore his eyes from the sky to turn to Morgana, bringing himself closer to her as though approaching a wounded animal, and crouched in front of her—just out of reach of teeth and claws. “Are you all right?”

Morgana couldn’t bear the weight of his concern; she looked away. Instinct pushed at her body from the inside, urging her to tear herself out of Raubahn’s embrace, but he felt like the only thing that kept her from falling apart. All she could do was let Sairsel see.

“No,” she said thinly. “But I’m alive.”

Sairsel nodded and fidgeted with the fabric wound around his palms. He glanced over his shoulder at the shadow of the Wall, those green eyes of his always watching.

“What did you call it?” he asked Raubahn.

“Yiazmat. An old god in Ala Mhigan legend. We—” Raubahn’s voice caught on the past, silent as a storm. “My father told it often when we were lads, Ilberd and I.”

Words came to Morgana unbidden, a memory welling up from a place she had forgotten: “‘One deity among dragons, one great wyrm to rule all wyrms of the world, by the creator himself created. Guardian to the most sacred blade in the land, most hallowed of its kind, its great power drove it to madness—and in the end, it became a threat to its own creator. Bound by the gods, cursed and exiled; from the bone of its wings did they create the first of the griffins, to guard the sacred sword with loyalty and pride.’”

Morgana blankly spoke the words, plunged into the remembering of Saskia pacing the floor of her tiny bedroom as she learned them. The monologue was three pages long, inconceivably boring, and Saskia had been meant to recite it before the mad king and his court—and it had all been for nothing, in the end. Three days before her troupe was meant to walk into the palace, Theodoric’s own kingsguard had opened the doors to the rebels, and by sunrise, the king’s body hung from the gates.

The legend was more vivid in Morgana’s mind now than it ever had been. She felt the whisper of a tremor against her skin, and only belatedly realized that it was not only the work of her own body: Raubahn was trembling, too. He had his old memories to contend with, the hauntings in his soul.

And Sairsel watched them both with a quiet strength Morgana did not think he had—he was uncertain, a tree bowing against the onslaught of a gale, but his roots were deep, and his back was straight.

“It’s a good story,” he said clumsily, filling the silence. Fidgeting. “You really think the primal is that Yiazmat?”

“Was,” Morgana corrected. She couldn’t believe—couldn’t accept—that the end of this had yet to come. “It was Yiazmat.”

Her head felt like it was moments from splitting open, but Morgana still got to her feet, bringing her focus to her shaky limbs. They were hers. There was no other voice inside her skull. She was herself; no more, and no less. But she couldn’t breathe without tasting wrongness on her tongue, even if she couldn’t name it.

“Morgana. I… There’s something I should tell you,” Sairsel said. 

Morgana caught the furtive gaze he cast over her shoulder at Raubahn. “You can say it in front of him.”

“We’ll need to speak to the Scions first, because they know more about—” Sairsel made a vague gesture, “all this than I do, but I think I… I saw—”

“Say it, boy.”

Sairsel let out a sharp breath. “While you were going half-mad, I saw a tether between you and the dragon. Like it was made out of light. And it flowed.”

“What are you saying?” Raubahn asked gruffly.

“You said your Echo was gone, didn’t you?” Sairsel said, looking at Morgana with that hunter’s sharpness in his eyes. Of course he hadn’t forgotten the finer details of her ridiculous outburst in front of him and Riot. “Maybe I’m wrong—like I said, the Scions know more about this than I ever will care to—but I think that’s where it went.”

Raubahn took in a quick, piercing breath. Morgana felt like she had been struck.

“That’s not,” Morgana said, and stopped herself. Her voice sounded brittle; she swallowed, willing the hard edges back onto her words. “That’s not possible.”

Sairsel said nothing. He wouldn’t contradict her, insist upon the reality that she denied—but for the first time, he looked at her like he knew he was right, and she was the fool. Empty as she felt, the merest spark of frustration had the warmth of all the rage she’d come to know as hers. She reached for it again, and it was as though her fingers could only barely brush it.

Her boy deserved better than to be the one upon whom she tried to sharpen it again, but she was weary and drained and her mind was spinning.

“What kind of faerie tale are you playing at, boy?” she demanded. 

“Morgana,” Raubahn said, almost a reprimand.

“You ‘saw’ a tether? Do you fancy yourself a Heart-Seer, now? Is that it?”

She took a step forward, and Sairsel didn’t draw back. He didn’t flinch, didn’t look away; he held her gaze, stubborn, and lifted his chin. What change in him had she been blind to?

“I don’t fancy myself anything,” Sairsel said sharply. “When I thought I was dying on the Wall, I heard a woman’s voice in my head, and since then, I’ve been seeing— Ashelia thinks it’s the Echo. I didn’t ask for it any more than you did. But I know what I saw.”

Morgana wanted to take a sledgehammer to that bloody crystal. _You don’t get to take my son._ She clenched her fists, looking at the ugly spires of the Wall, and only uncurled her fingers when Raubahn touched her wrist.

“Speak to the Archons,” he said. “I’ll go and meet with Kan-E-Senna and the others. Mayhap we will all have answers to share with each other on the morrow.”

In Sairsel’s presence, he made no gesture of intimacy or affection. He merely looked into her eyes—and that was enough. His gaze had a weary brokenness to it, but he was steadfast; he always had been. To Morgana’s surprise, he turned to Sairsel with the look of a commander.

“I would appreciate your presence at this meeting, Sairsel. Once you’ve given your testimony to the Scions with Morgana, go to the Lotus Stand—I will let the gate guard know I sent for you.”

Sairsel opened his mouth, closed it, and straightened his shoulders. “Aye, sir.”

“Good lad.”

When Raubahn was gone, Sairsel lingered. Morgana exhaled sharply through her nose.

“Run along and find Alphinaud, boy. I won’t be far behind.”

“Fine,” Sairsel said, almost entirely restraining the exasperated gesture of his hands at his sides as he walked away.

Morgana gripped the railing in front of her and closed her eyes. When she opened them, the cage that had held Yiazmat was still gone—and for a moment, she thought she heard the distant beating of wings on the wind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> once again, i have to thank [livvy](https://onwesterlywinds.tumblr.com) for all her input - she was a tremendous help in working out how to adapt the primal summoning to make it more personal to the ala mhigan characters, and brilliantly suggested yiazmat when i told her i was thinking of using something out of ivalice as an alternative to shinryu. 💚


	12. 4.0 ― ALA MHIGO

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> > what's it really for if it's not yours and it's not mine?  
> this victory is not what i hoped for  
> how was i to know that everything would end up like this?  
> survival of the fittest of sorts
> 
> ― [the guardian (ellie's song)](https://open.spotify.com/track/6TK7jlyIMfrumIBpRHujT7?si=6h7AxTDsSKSzm6_b-52OzA), shawn james

The man within the god does not sleep, but neither is he awake.

He simply is.

His mind and body are carved, inextricably, into the god’s very bones; naught remains of him, not in any way that could be distinguished or measured, for he is the molten steel that has forged a weapon.

But the god’s blood is not his. It is not blood—it is life, power, a gift. A blight that burns the world, an echo born of fallen stars.

_Boundless rage. Bottomless despair._ Words of another echo given shape, made tangible enough to fill the god’s material form, to animate its every breath. The god knows nothing else, and the churning light of its own blood sears its flesh from the inside.

In the world below the skies, blood stains the stone—a river, a storm, a weeping upon the land. The soul buried deep inside the god’s flesh, locked in an endless struggle, rages and roars in its longing for the fight for which it was brought into this hateful world.

No god was ever made to serve. Yet its wings are folded in a passive shield around its burning body, its head bowed and its hungry eyes closed, and death would suit but never does. The light of its blood will not allow it—and so it exists in a half-life, like the wretch of its ancient exile, violated and drowning in the blood it cannot spill.

The new old god is bound until the griffins come.

Morgana wiped the tears streaking through the soot on her face with her sleeve. Around her, the procession thinned to rejoin with the celebration on the ground below—it was one thing to let herself weep as one woman among dozens of her countrymen as they raised their voices in freedom, but the loss of that anonymity made her feel too bare. She’d stopped the tears, but her breath still shuddered in her lungs, quivering with silent sobs that she kept trapped in her chest.

From where he walked at Lyse’s shoulder—the commander and the liberator—Sairsel stopped to look back at his mother, finding her like he’d known where she was even before he turned. Morgana gave him a single nod and made to lift a hand to wave him away, but let it drop to her side again.

‘Thank you,’ she mouthed instead.

Perhaps for the first time since she had met him as a young man, Sairsel smiled openly and without restraint, his soft eyes bright. One day, perhaps, Morgana would find the words to tell him how strong he looked in that moment, bloodied and bruised from his battle with Zenos; how handsome he was when he smiled.

How proud she was to have him for a son.

As Sairsel nodded back to her and turned away with an awkward wave, Morgana sniffed and blinked back the fresh tears that blurred her vision. She looked at the sky to steady herself, drinking in the sweeping grandeur of the way the sunset touched the mountains and the sea of clouds beyond the city. 

Something tugged at her from the inside. The strange, heavy beat her heart took was familiar, and by now nearly forgotten—she braced herself to be plunged in the cold waters of the Echo, but no vision came. Still, the vestiges of the blessing pulled at her, and she found herself turning and looking upon the flowerbeds, past the one where the soil had drunk Zenos’ blood, searching the horizon of the Menagerie, and—

Raubahn drifted towards her, lingering even after the exit of his Alliance comrades. The blessing still pulled at her like an impatient child at the leg of her trousers, but she quieted it; her heart jumped in her chest again at the sight of him bathed in that soft, beautiful light—and she knew that this had nothing to do with the Echo. Everything in that one beat of her heart was hers.

They weren’t alone on the promenade, not by far. For a moment, they stood apart, sharing a silent look—because there were no words for this that either of them could ever find. But their shared understanding wasn’t enough; the distance wasn’t right.

Morgana stepped forward and embraced Raubahn with everything she had, ignoring every ache the battle had left in her body and the exhaustion in her muscles. The burns spreading all the way down her left arm had gone numb beneath their thick bandages for a time, but she ignored the new flare of pain that ripped through her as she moved.

It didn’t matter; she was alive. She was alive and free, and she had seen her son smile, and she was holding the man she—

The man she loved.

Raubahn’s breath was warm and trembling against her neck as she clung to his shoulders. His chest shook with suppressed sobs, a halting tide that Morgana felt pouring into her own body until tears were rolling silently down her cheeks once more.

She pulled back without letting go, bringing her hand to Raubahn’s face to wipe away his tears; he touched his forehead to hers and brushed his thumb against her cheek. Morgana felt like she was drowning, awash in the chaos of elation and relief and guilt for every moment of suffering that could never be unbroken—but she was breathing. They both were.

When she tilted her face up, Raubahn kissed her with dizzying abandon, and she could only answer in kind.

His linkpearl chirped.

“Hells.”

Morgana heard herself laugh as though it were someone else’s voice. “No rest for the victorious.”

“Evidently,” Raubahn said, tipping his forehead down against hers again. His thumb stroked the old scars on the side of her neck, and for once, Morgana closed her eyes and accepted the intimacy of it. “I have to return to Porta Praetoria.”

“Go on, then, General,” Morgana said.

His fingers trailed down to the top of her left shoulder—stopping a few ilms short of the bandages. “Will you be all right?”

Morgana nodded. “I’ll be down before the poppy wears off. I just want to enjoy this view a little while longer.”

As the pink hues in the sky faded into gold, Raubahn looked at her as though memorizing the way the light touched her skin—a brief indulgence before he pressed a kiss to her brow and slipped away. Before long, the Menagerie was empty but for her, and the pull crashed into her like something screaming at the back of her mind.

For a moment, Morgana considered that perhaps she needed numbing sooner than she thought she would, but her feet wouldn’t budge—not towards the stairs. That fierce tugging at her heart had too much direction, and she knew without wondering that no anodyne could make it fade. The Echo never had, and neither had the torn wound of it even after the Wall.

She walked down the promenade and between the bright flower beds, a seeker of nothing that she knew; she had the freedom to let herself be guided by something that was not quite instinct. And her steps took her to the very edge of the bridge to the airship landing where it had been destroyed by the primal—by Yiazmat. Morgana would be a fool to pretend she had not felt its rage in the hollows of her body while she was screaming from the magitek blast that seared her flesh, and she would be a liar to say that she felt no strange emptiness lingering in its wake.

The monster-god was dead along with the animal who had desecrated it. She ought to be glad of it, she knew, but she could only grasp some quiet sorrow; more loss. Always loss.

Then she saw him, his damaged armour drinking the sunset’s gold tones, the griffin flying upon his back as it flew from the city walls once more. Even seeing him trembling on his hands and knees, Morgana’s rage returned in a heartbeat, sparking so violently that she barely realized she was moving until her boot crashed into Ilberd’s ribs.

He groaned and coughed. It wasn’t enough.

Morgana was on him in instants, pouncing like a caged animal let loose at last. She shoved him onto his back and pinned his arms under her knees before he could begin to fight back, stumbling over her own exhaustion to slam her fist down on his face until she saw blood.

“You’re supposed to be dead!” she roared.

“Morgana—”

“Keep my name out of your mouth! Do you know what you did to me?” Her good hand closed over his throat. “Do you know what you took from me?”

Ilberd’s arms trembled under her knees, struggling for freedom, but all he could do was gasp for breath and choke out some words. “You never wanted it. You knew it was a curse.”

Strangling him one-handed wasn’t enough. Beating him to a pulp wouldn’t be enough. Stabbing him until he was choking on his own blood wouldn’t be enough. The emptiness he’d left inside Morgana clawed at him, yearning for every moment of brutality they had seen and suffered and dealt—and nothing she could do in the finality of one life, one instant, could be enough. She brought her left hand down even as a dizzying wave of pain rushed over her arm, even if there was barely enough strength in her fingers to close over his throat. She needed to do this with every part of her—the broken and the whole alike. 

“It was mine,” she growled through gritted teeth as his boots began to scrape the ground, and then her voice was rising and breaking again. “It was mine!”

Ilberd’s lips parted in silence, finding no breath, and Morgana’s entire body shook. She pinned and choked him with all her weight, but the strength was waning from her muscles and bones. She didn’t know if it was the moment Ilberd saw her weakness, or whether he simply looked at her to plead for his life, but his gaze met hers—and all at once, she let go, fighting a wave of nausea that fell over her at the pain in her left arm. Ilberd gulped in great, gasping breaths; Morgana panted as she slumped, still halfway over him.

Her rage built, climbing over her the unbearable feeling of helplessness, and her voice wrenched a wordless howl from the bottom of her ribcage.

When Ilberd freed one of his arms from under her, he did nothing to fight her or shove her off; his fingers merely went to his throat while he regained some semblance of control over his breath.

“Get off me,” he said quietly, his voice rasping as though it were being dredged up in shards from within his chest.

Morgana’s spine snapped straight at the sound of his words; she looked down at him and felt her lip curl. “We are well past me giving you anything you want,” she hissed as she grabbed his jaw, fingers digging hard into his skin. The muscles under her fingers went taut as he gritted his teeth.

“And what is it you want, Morgana?”

“I want,” she said, and no other words came. She didn’t know if there were words at all for what she wanted—only that it sat like a fist at the bottom of her ribcage. The longer she touched Ilberd, the more it seemed to shift into a blade piercing her lungs.

She let go with a shove and hauled herself off of him, sitting with her back against to the balustrade as she pulled her knees up, her hand covering her face.

In that moment, all she really wanted was to sleep. She wanted a healer to numb the pain radiating through her arm. She wanted to hold her son like a real mother would. She wanted to lay her head on Raubahn’s chest and listen to his heartbeat, if only for one night. She wanted Ilberd dead and she wanted to ignore the part of her that whispered that she would only be giving him what he wanted.

“I want to know why you did this to me,” Morgana said at last.

Ilberd sat up slowly, keeping a steadying hand on the ground. He peeled off one gauntlet, then the other; wiped the back of his hand across his bloody mouth and under his nose; and spat red into a nearby flower bed.

“Little Commander Leveilleur wasn’t clever enough to work out the finer points of primal summoning?”

“Leave the boy be, you miserable worm,” Morgana snapped. “I don’t want a scholar’s thesis. I want you to answer for why you chose to do what you did to _me._ ”

Her fingers went to the dagger sitting at the small of her back when Ilberd stood, but he barely moved. He merely stared up at the sky, then looked around at the Menagerie with eyes Morgana couldn’t read.

“Was I just the nearest unlucky fool with the Echo?” she pressed.

“Yes and no,” Ilberd said without looking at her. “Without crystals for the ritual, it required power; prayers, life, sacrifice... The Ascian had his say with the Eyes and the dead. I expected your gift to lend power, but I would have my say with our deaths—yours and mine.”

Morgana loosed a bitter scoff. “You mean to say that your fucking ritual reaching inside me and ripping out a part of me was an afterthought to wanting me dead?”

“The Echo was secondary in my mind, aye,” he said sharply. “I knew that there would be no end to Yiazmat’s power if it was born of you and I.”

“There is no you and I.”

It was Ilberd’s turn to scoff, shaking his head before turning the cold steel of his gaze to her. “We are the same, Morgana. We have emptied our own husks and filled them with rage to keep ourselves alive. You saw it as well as I when we fought.”

“You have no right,” Morgana said, spitting out the words to make herself believe them.

He had no right to her death. He had no right to the ghost of her power. He had no right to _her._

“No,” Ilberd said simply.

Morgana shot to her feet as he walked to the edge of the promenade, moving towards him in spite of the dizziness making her unsteady. She refused to let him jump a second time.

“Don’t you dare,” she growled.

Ilberd merely glanced at her—and rather than jump, he began unfastening his armour. Piece by piece, the Griffin shed his feathers and his claws, and piece by piece did they tumble over the edge and into the abyss of the mountains. All that remained was a man in a shirt that hung loose over his bones and blood-stained trousers, holding a tattered white-and-violet cloak as the sun set.

Morgana came to stand beside him. It could be so easy: one push, and she could let the poppy sing her to sleep tonight knowing that justice had been done. But it would only be justice for her— and barely so. She didn’t want it to be easy. She reached out, took the cloak from Ilberd’s hands, and draped it over her shoulder.

“Step away,” she said quietly. “I won’t let you take the easy way out.”

“Do you truly think that any of this is easy?” Ilberd asked. Still, he stepped back.

“I don’t think,” Morgana said. The burning in her arm was rising to such heights that it began to throb at her temples in time with her pulse, but she wasn’t done. She dragged Ilberd towards the blood-soaked flowerbed, her fingers tight around his arm. “I know that the mad king was a coward who poisoned himself rather than face the people he tormented. I know that Zenos slit his own throat rather than—”

Both of them stopped dead as they came to the flowerbed where the viceroy had taken his life. Nestled in the trampled flowers and crowned by blood, the Eyes of Nidhogg seethed in silence at their feet. A curse rose to Morgana’s lips and stayed caught in her throat.

Ilberd turned and grabbed the sword at her hip, wrenching it out of its sheath. On instinct, Morgana stepped out of his reach and shouted his name.

But he didn’t turn the blade on her. In that moment, she was utterly out of his mind: there was only the Eyes, the violence of their pull. Ilberd drove the sword down into one eye with a growl, both hands pressing down on the hilt as the eye writhed and shuddered in a refusal to relinquish its own power. The seething, sickly red burst, then faded away until there was nothing left of the eye.

Ilberd turned to its twin, breathing hard through his nose. Without tearing his gaze from it, he extended his arm towards Morgana, loosening his grip on her sword in a silent offering.

Her bandaged arm hung limply at her side and still flared with pain, but Morgana’s right hand still had strength enough. She took her sword without a word of gratitude and plunged it into the eye.

Nidhogg’s rage filled her mind all at once, jostling her own and pulling at what remained of her that had made up Yiazmat, trying to take hold of the darkness she had failed to control that night. Her grip shook. She heard herself cry out through gritted teeth, and then Ilberd’s hand joined hers on the hilt of her sword, and the eye burst with a pulse of power that left her nauseous.

Morgana stumbled back, wrenching her sword out of the ground and shaking off Ilberd.

“It’s over,” Ilberd said, and Morgana couldn’t tell whether he sounded liberated or broken.

Perhaps it was both. Beyond the victory, she had always known that there would be no putting her back—not entirely. _We are the same._

Morgana turned to Ilberd, sword still in hand.

She crashed the pommel into his temple and watched him drop to his knees.


	13. 4.1 ― ALA MHIGO

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning: brief allusion to sexual assault (implied) in narration.
> 
> this chapter features saskia emery, an actor turned spy and morgana's former lover, and mentions neesa, saskia's partner. 
> 
> it also includes the first mentions of the undercity, my friend livvy's concept for a hidden society underneath ala mhigo (based on the area of the same name in vagrant story), as featured in her amazing series [godhands](https://onwesterlywinds.tumblr.com/tagged/Godhands/chrono). please read godhands.

Saskia still carried a dagger in her boot. It was a sleek, slender thing with a gleaming stiletto blade and a thin hilt wrapped in leather—a gift from Neesa, almost fifteen years ago. The metal had been wreathed in blue under the pale lights of the Undercity.

“A needle for these fancy new togs of yours,” she’d said. “In case of a tear.”

They hadn’t spoken of the thing Neesa was really afraid of: the looming threat, the specter that haunted any woman in the city above should she cross paths too closely with the wrong imperial or, gods forbid, seek out their attention as Saskia intended. Neesa feared men’s hands making the tear—a familiar thing to most women, especially in the Undercity, but women like Neesa always carried daggers.

It was different where the soldiers walked, and they both knew it. But they wouldn’t speak of it, so Saskia didn’t tell her that the needle couldn’t make her safer—not in this. Using it would mean showing her true allegiances, branding herself as a traitor, inviting death upon herself. 

Still, she wore it for years; an illusion of safety, in the same way that Neesa’s silence in the face of her fears made them seem more distant. And somehow, she’d survived it all—the spying, the hands, the revolt turning her heart and her stomach every single day for decades. She had always been a gifted actor.

Even now that the white flags had burned to ash, she walked with her needle tucked away along the side of her left calf. It was her balance, as strange on her body now as the bones with which she had been born, and freedom could only mean safety to a naïve fool. Ala Mhigo had been burning for twenty-five years; no flying griffin banner could smother those flames.

In time, perhaps; Saskia was not such a cynic to have lost that hope. But not so soon.

When a voice spoke her name from within the shadows outside the old theatre, Saskia whirled around with the needle flashing in her hand.

“I need your help,” said the voice, cold and sharp at steel. And from the shadows stepped out Morgana Arroway, age lining her eyes with old suffering to match the slashes of scars fading upon her skin.

Saskia’s fingers went slack. The stiletto tumbled out of her hands and fell onto the cobblestones with a delicate clatter as she threw her arms around Morgana’s shoulders, embracing her so fiercely that the hood fell away from Morgana’s head.

“You’re alive,” Saskia breathed. “You’re here.”

“I am,” Morgana said. She held Saskia tightly, but only with one arm. When Saskia pulled back and tried to put both hands on her shoulders, Morgana flinched.

“Mora, are you—” Saskia began, covering her mouth with one hand as Morgana pulled back the left side of her cloak to reveal the bandages wrapped around most of her arm. “What happened?”

“Battle,” Morgana said stiffly, hardened by the ancient sound of the name Saskia had spoken. “I need your help, Saskia. This isn’t the reunion we deserve, I know, but there’ll be time for that later.”

It was not the reunion they deserved; it was business, the sort that could only be done between old friends whose bonds held on little more than the past. And so Saskia looked at the woman she had loved so fiercely with different eyes—the eyes of a spy.

“What do you need?”

“A place to hide someone far from prying eyes. Ideally, somewhere we can fit chains.”

Twenty years ago, those words—and the taut bitterness that spoke them—might have shocked Saskia. Now, she merely raised an eyebrow. “Would you rather I hold my questions until the end?”

“I would rather you not ask them at all, if it’s all the same to you,” Morgana said dryly.

“But it is rather difficult to get what we want when we’re already in the position of asking another for help, isn’t it?”

That was what surviving had been on this side of the Wall: a constant measure of wants and needs, the balancing of the give and take. By the look on Morgana’s face, it had been much different on the side of exile; if her scars and the look in her eyes already hadn’t spoken so much, her reaction would have done the rest. She looked rather like a lost lamb—if the lamb had the bearings of a wolf.

“Peace, Morgana. I won’t ask unless I need to,” Saskia said, and that was the courtesy she had for the people they once had been.

Morgana shook her head. “Fair is fair,” she said. She looked over her shoulder and made a clipped beckoning gesture of her hand.

A man in a white hood stepped around the corner, his face obscured by shadows. He was taller than Morgana, and larger—but his body looked worn under the threadbare cowl he wore, his dark skin stretching thinly over the bones of his hands. His wrists were bound.

“You’re no imperial,” Saskia remarked. In truth, she’d expected Morgana to produce an ill-fated Garlean upon whom she meant to exact some private revenge—and Saska would not have immediately condemned the intention. Not anymore.

But even in the single utterance of the word “No,” the man’s accent unmistakably proved him to be one of their own. Saskia glanced at Morgana and found her expression more closely guarded than she’d ever seen it.

“I need him off the streets, Saskia. It won’t be permanent. I tried to go to that old warehouse near where the fish market used to be, but—”

“It burned down,” Saskia said. She picked up her needle, slid it back into her boot, and turned. “Come on; let’s go inside.”

The theatre had long since been boarded up and marked with a plague warning—a convenient fabrication by the Resistance to draw away imperial eyes—but Saskia knew it better than every home she’d ever had. There was no one left but her to watch over it, no one left to guard its secrets. Even with Ala Mhigo liberated, she felt a duty to the place that had once seemed like the only thing that held any remnant of who she really was.

Morgana hung back behind her charge rather than walk beside Saskia as she guided them through the narrow door hidden behind a tangle of vines. The man was silent beneath his hood, walking through the world as though he were merely a spectre of someone who no longer was.

“You could have fled while we were talking,” Saskia said, glancing at him. She pushed the door open.

“I’ve no reason to run.” His gaze seemed fixed ahead beneath the hood; he gave no indication of noticing the way Saskia studied him until her eyes went to his bindings. “Nor to fight. She means to spite me.”

“Shut up,” Morgana said, rather more like a child than a gaoler—her contempt was unmistakable, but not grounded in much authority.

Saskia felt increasingly as though she were handling something volatile, but she said nothing and merely slipped inside, as she had countless times in the last two decades. She couldn’t remember the last time she had done it with someone walking behind her. Alone, she could walk through the theater with her eyes closed; as a consideration for her guests, she pulled a lightstone from her pocket and let its soft glow define the gloom.

“Are we backstage?” Morgana asked, distant—one foot in the past.

“We are.”

“I’ve never been in this part of the building, have I?” 

“This used to be a repository. We knocked down the walls after the place closed down.”

“‘We?’”

This, Saskia did not answer. She guided them to the yawning mouth of the stage, which stood tall enough that even Morgana’s captive could stand under it without having to bend his head. The hammocks that had been used by the Resistance to rest while in hiding still hung from the beams, for Saskia had never had the heart to remove them and accept the finality of loss. They were silent relics, as was the theatre.

Morgana eyed them warily. “Please tell me that’s not—”

“Of course not,” Saskia said, setting down her lightstone on the ground so that Morgana might see the outline of the trapdoor set into the floor.

She knelt, unlocked the thick padlock with the key she kept around her neck, and swung the trapdoor open with a sweeping gesture that belonged on the stage rather than under it. Gazing down the shadowed stair, Morgana’s man raised his bound hands to tug down his hood with a heavy breath.

“After you,” Saskia said to Morgana, gazing at the man once more.

Without the mystique of the hood, he truly did seem only like a man. There was a weariness settled deep underneath his eyes, his age and hardships written in the lines of his frown and in his scars—in that, he seemed no different than Morgana. She was already halfway down the stairs, and so Saskia stopped her captive before he followed her down.

“Who are you?” Saskia asked.

“Saskia,” Morgana warned from below.

“I’m curious. You knew that when you came to me for help.”

The man looked at Saskia, his gaze heavy. “I’m no one,” he said, turning to head down the stairs. 

Saskia sighed and followed after him.

At the base of the stairs lay some approximation of a living space—it was by no means luxurious, but it was safe and hidden. If it had been good enough for the boy the Resistance had spent nearly a full year believing to be the mad king’s long-lost nephew, it should be good enough for Morgana.

She looked appraisingly at the bed, the storage chest, the meager shelf of books that were, for the most part, either bound plays or children’s tales. As Saskia had expected, Morgana frowned at the closed door to the right of the bed.

“Where does this lead?”

“You needn’t worry about it opening,” Saskia said, crossing her arms.

Morgana frowned, her fingers tracing the carvings in the metal plate that reinforced the wood where a latch should have been; instead, there was only a simple engraving of a flower. Only Neesa knew the existence of this door on the other side, and that was a precious rarity in the Undercity.

“I don’t like it,” Morgana said.

“I brought you here because I trust you—and one would think that you came to me because you trust me. The least you could do is act like it,” Saskia said, her tone gentle despite her words.

It was asking the world of Morgana to expect her trust after twenty years; Saskia understood that. But it was asking the world of her, too.

Morgana nodded. Saskia stepped closer and removed the chain from around her neck, placing the key—a spiked disk not unlike the shape of a flower—in her palm and closing her fingers over it.

“I will want this back,” Saskia said, and Morgana gave another nod. She glanced over Morgana’s shoulder at the broken man and added: “Be merciful. I wager he’s had enough.”

Morgana looked back, following her gaze, and her silence was heavy enough to stifle the three of them.

“What the fuck is this?”

Sairsel stood on the very last step, his shoulders visibly tensing as he took in the small room underneath the old theatre—and its lone occupant.

“It is trust, boy,” Morgana said from where she was stuck in the narrow stairway behind him. She nudged his shoulder, and he took a mere two steps forward, keeping near to the wall and away from Ilberd.

At first, Morgana thought it fear; she still looked at him like he was the boy who’d first appeared to her in the desert, nervous and stubborn in equal measure. But the Sairsel who stood beside her now had faced the man he feared most and prevailed, and though he spoke little of it, Zenos had left far deeper scars on him than Ilberd ever could.

Sairsel could only look upon him with disdain.

“Young Arroway,” Ilberd said, his nod more courteous than his tone. Morgana’s instinct was to step between the two of them, but Sairsel stood tall enough on his own. “You look well.”

“Piss off,” Sairsel snapped, turning to Morgana with sharp eyes and a sharp tongue. “How in every bloody hell is he alive?”

There were not enough gods to whom Morgana might wish that Sairsel had not picked this day, of all days, to inhabit his stones. She crossed her arms and shrugged, throwing Ilberd a glance.

“Have you got any idea?” she asked him.

She knew he didn’t. They had barely spoken of Yiazmat—or much at all—since the night of the liberation, but if she was right, Ilberd understood as little of this thing that bound them as she did. He tortured himself with many other questions, besides—the why rather than the how—and Morgana was content to let him.

And Sairsel didn’t care to wait for Ilberd’s answer. “There wasn’t anything left of him when he took— when Zenos took over Yiazmat,” he said, looking increasingly ill as he spoke. “There shouldn’t have been.”

“You’d be better off debating this with your mother’s Scion friends, boy. But they don’t know I’m alive, do they, Morgana?”

“No.”

“Have you told Raubahn?” Sairsel asked.

“Why would I tell him?” Morgana said, her tone sharper than it should have been. Sairsel opened his mouth, suddenly unsure, and she worked a scowl onto her face rather than appear defensive. “I don’t want the Alliance sticking their noses into this. It’s Ala Mhigan business.”

“So bring Lyse here; not me. What do you want me to do about this? Empty his piss bucket?”

“I don’t want you to do anything. This is temporary—until things settle down enough so that justice can be done our way; not the Alliance’s.”

For the first time, Morgana stiffened under the weight of Sairsel’s gaze, rather than the other way around. He was beginning to use those sharp eyes of his for more than looking at trees, and it made him shrewd in a way his own mother wouldn’t have credited him with. His silence gave way to understanding.

“Raubahn put the shits up you when he asked me what I thought the Alliance should do about his accomplices, didn’t he?” Sairsel asked at last, pointing his thumb in the general vicinity of Ilberd, whose expression remained unchanged at the mention of Laurentius and Yuyuhase. “He wasn’t shy about wanting an execution.”

“I know,” Morgana said.

“Then why are you worried? I don’t see Raubahn becoming a paragon of mercy for the sake of the man who bloody dismembered him. Let him hang.”

“I told you: the Alliance hasn’t got a right to him. It’s our people he slaughtered; we’re the ones who should have a say.” Morgana turned her gaze on Ilberd. “This is ours to end.”

“So you brought me here—why?” Sairsel asked, his features shifting into a frown as he followed the line of her gaze, then looked back at her. “To finish what I started in Wilred’s name? For all the others I could have joined at the Wall?”

Sairsel was quick. Before she could react, he had already snatched the dagger Morgana kept at her belt, crossing the small room over to Ilberd in a few decisive steps. He ignored her when she called his name and grabbed a fistful of Ilberd’s hair to bare his throat to the blade.

“Is this what you want from me, Morgana?” Sairsel demanded, his voice rougher than Morgana had ever heard it. “I slew Yiazmat. I brought Zenos to the brink. This is what he made me, so why not make good use of it before the Alliance claims our vengeance from under us?”

“Sairsel, stop this,” Morgana ordered, but she didn’t move.

He shook his head and pressed the dagger harder against Ilberd’s throat, looking down into his eyes. Ilberd’s shackled hands rose, his fingers curling in the front of Sairsel’s coat to steady himself, and he held Sairsel’s stare without struggle.

“You know, I was angry for you,” Sairsel said quietly. “When Zenos showed me Yiazmat in that cage he made, when he decided to take this thing you brought into the world for Ala Mhigo like it was a fucking puppet for him to play with, I was angry. He spoke of you like you were nothing but the feelings that gave it life—like you were no one. And it broke my heart. Even after everything you did, you were ours.”

“But?” Ilberd asked, his tone so sharp he seemed moments away from grabbing the knife and finishing the job himself.

“If I’d known you were still in there to see Ala Mhigo freed when all those people— when _you’re_ the one who kept them from ever seeing it, I wouldn’t have wasted a single second on you. You’re not even worth the time it’d take me to wash the blood off my hands,” Sairsel said, and he shoved Ilberd back onto his cot before dropping the dagger, hilt-first, back into Morgana’s hand.

She looked down at the blade, then at Ilberd.

“I want nothing to do with this,” Sairsel said as he started making his way up the stairs. “If I were you, I’d let him rot.”

“Boy,” Morgana said, but Sairsel didn’t stop.

Ilberd waited until the trapdoor had slammed shut above them to speak. 

“You lied to him.”

“Excuse me?”

“When you told him you trusted him. You didn’t; not when he walked into this room. This was a test.”

Morgana took in a calm breath, but said nothing; she felt strangely satisfied. None of the judgement that reigned in Ilberd’s voice could dampen it.

“He’s a strong lad,” Ilberd said, stretching his legs out across the cot and lying with his hands folded over his ribs. He was still too thin, too much like a ghost in a half-life. The longer Morgana looked at him, the more it angered her—especially his contempt. “Shame he’s already falling apart and his own mother can’t even see it.”

He had no right to speak of parenthood to her, but when Morgana opened her mouth to speak his children’s names, they splintered on her tongue.

“And the mothers of all the youths piled up at the bottom of the Wall—what do you think they’ll see when they look at you?” she said instead.

Ilberd fell silent. Morgana knew he would say nothing else, so she slid her dagger back into its sheath and turned to leave. At the very least, she could sleep easy knowing that whatever contempt he felt for her, she could return in kind.

_We are the same._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> END PART TWO.


	14. HE SCREAMS FOR MERCY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am once again giving livvy a shout-out for the inspiration to use vagrant story room names as chapter titles. please read her [godhands](https://onwesterlywinds.tumblr.com/tagged/godhands/chrono) series.

She does not remember climbing the stairs to the gallows.

The mountains surround her, silent judges in the fog—the old man who always sat by the cold hearth said that they had risen from seas of blood thousands of years past, and that they had faded to the colour of rust when the winds came with dust. She looks down at her bound hands: slick and dripping thick red, nearly black. Thousands of years before it can fade to rust.

Her noose shudders in the wind that carries the clamouring of an entire nation, that whips the fabric of every standard flying upon the wall. Viper’s-eye yellow, cinder black, sunset red—and unmarred violet to join the icy blue.

Every bone, every vertebrae in her back remembers the weight of wings, of liberty, of suffering. Her heart remembers being unafraid—her mind remembers how loss numbed the fear.

She searches the crowd with empty eyes, every face belonging to no one; her vision twists and narrows into slits as her breath comes like fire, as if through the hard press of a hand over her mouth. For the first time in this life—the life that holds nothing but rage and despair—she feels the ill-timed drumming of her heart, so hard and so frantic it means to shatter her ribs.

The bull and the griffin, black fur and pure white feathers, stand upon the gallows to preside over her end, and she tries to will her heart to burst rather than suffer this hell. _End me,_ chants her mind as the griffin advances and takes hold of the noose, _end me._ The bull’s eyes are an empty void, but it sees all: her infant fear, the remnants of rage that lie at her feet. _End me, end me,_ she wants so that she does not have to watch the bull give the nod that will end her.

Her heart does not burst, but it beats, painfully alive as the griffin loops the noose around her neck. It hurts to be alive, it has hurt for years, and she desperately searches the crowd once more in the pointless hope that she may die looking upon the faces that gave her a life.

The noose is in the griffin’s hand again. What remains of her waking mind asks: how many times must I suffer this moment? How much longer must she endure the fear of her end?

There is another on the platform, she realizes—not a beast that she knows, nothing that takes a shape she can understand, but a presence that is familiar for how it pressed upon her very being. The too-bright, golden, thirsting thing that bound and lacerated every part of her being when she was a god, it shifts and twists and swallows. It takes the noose from the griffin, ripping out a handful of feathers in a spill of blood. Her broken anger flares as the feathers float down at its feet.

 _End me end me end me,_ she begs without voice, fighting the confines of her own sins to struggle free from the inescapable grip of the thirsting thing upon her very soul. There is no leaving this trap, this cage—not when she built the bars herself—and she can only stand broken on the gallows as the thirsting thing tightens the noose, claws holding fast the rope, until she is on her knees and gasping for breath.

The griffin helps her to her feet, talons twisting in her hair, and pulls at the noose to loosen its hold on her throat, her painful breath. For a mercy, the bull wants her to have a clean death; the rope should break her neck. Knowing does not ease the animal panic that leaps through her veins.

She wanted to die then. With her would-be death a thing of the past, she no longer knows how to be—and still she fears and resents the coming of her end.

Moment by moment, the crowd thins until the wind is alone in the mountains, and she begins to find faces in the expanse—her true judges. The bull and the griffin are merely actors, hands to turn her face towards the sun. Steorra stands silent, stone-faced, shame tumbling from her gaze.

_Forgive me. My star, forgive me._

Her lips shape the words, and blood muffles their sound. In the heat of her breath, in the slits of her eyes, she understands: she raises her bound hands to claw at the mask, to show Steorra her face again. There are no gods that she can beg, none that will answer as she watches the fall of Byregot’s hammer. Onyx eyes stare, all their warmth gone—they were lost the moment they became scales.

 _I am yours._ Words buried in years and ashes. Flames wreath the last two judges, hand in hand, two faces of the same coin. Their stillness, their oneness kills her. She wants to scream, but the weight of the mask crushes her mouth.

The griffin places a hand upon the lever, and so she looks to the bull one last time. She does not beg for forgiveness, not here, and she does not speak of brotherhood, for she knows that she cut the bonds herself. All she can do is hold the bull’s empty stare and turn her head towards the four left standing before the gallows, that the bull may see how they remain. There is no final word, no request. Nothing but the presence of those who lived.

All that remains is this: she sits in her fear, in their judgement, and awaits the bite of the noose.

So, too, do the bull and the griffin wait.

As the moon moved across the sky, Morgana lay trembling in her bed, locked in a stillness so deep that the night hag may have been sitting atop her chest. A crawling sensation lingered in the wake of the sweat cooling on her exposed skin, but her fingers did not respond to the urge to claw at her arms, her legs, her belly. The darkened ceiling tipped and swayed like a ship on troubled seas.

Morgana knew the shifting of the material, the unwelcome expansion of her mind and soul to become memories and feelings that did not belong to her—but it had never before taken root in the intimacy of her dreams. She thought herself free from it all, even if the price was to know that she may never be whole again.

Its renewed hold was a horror that she felt through the very fabric of her body. Her mind had no guidance for her, no words or names. All she had then was the shuddering of her breath, the pounding of her heart, and the binding of her limbs to her bed. 

Slowly, the night hag pushed herself up from her chest, with all the caution and struggle of an old woman with brittle, rattling bones. Morgana’s body remembered choking, the cold grip around her neck—and she could move again, her hand closing over her throat in a panic. She grasped at calm, gulped in every breath that reached her lungs as her fingers touched the old claw marks on her skin.

They did not pinch and pain her as they once had for a long while. A ghost of old hurts remained, but the last touch she had felt, the last touch… 

Raubahn. His thumb tracing the scars, his gentleness worlds away from violence.

The violence was all hers, and it echoed through her body like the swinging of a pendulum.

Morgana sat up and slipped out of bed on still-trembling limbs, aches fading awake with every motion. There was precious little strength in her burned arm still, and though she was past the worst of the pain, the jagged lacework of scars pulled at her skin all wrong. She dressed herself in the dark, working through the clumsiness that still felt brand new; she bit down on her bottom lip as she tied back her hair and endured the crawling noise that came alive under her skin.

They were good scars to have—and Morgana had long since learned that there was such a thing. She would have given life and limb fighting for the freedom of her people; the magitek’s fire had taken only a mere fraction of her flesh in the greatest of her battles. Her helplessness at the loss was an easy thing to accept in the face of victory, unavoidable as it remained.

Better to pay this price than to lose an arm to a betrayer’s blade, or a sliver of a soul—forfeited by another—to the twisted birth of a dead god.

The dream clung to Morgana still: when she stepped out into the night, she could almost taste the air as it had been under the rust-covered mountains, from the perch of the gallows. Nausea sank low into her belly; it was all she could do to keep her steps from faltering, her body from weakening under its own trembling. But she pressed on.

She needed to know it wasn’t hers. Her guilt, her pain, her anger that warped into fear. If it remained—whether hers or not—it would choke her.

Morgana made for the old theatre intent on excising this burden from her body, but the shadows in her deserted street crawled in answer to someone else’s steps. She stilled, fingers touching the dagger at her hip, and let herself be struck by the anticipatory thrum of her heartbeat. A mere few weeks past, she would never have waited for a threat to strike from within the dark, but even her instincts were dulled by weariness.

She was in no mood nor state for a fight. Her pulse struck a high chord as the shadows parted, and then her shoulders released all the tension that had built in those instants at the sight of Raubahn.

“Morgana,” he said as her hand fell away from the dagger, his surprise evident—albeit only for a moment. It shifted quickly enough into knowing. “Can’t sleep?”

She shook her head, and that was that. More than ever, she was glad for their mutual understanding; they both had a lifetime’s worth of hauntings and wounds to plague their dreams, and a peaceful night was a thing hard-won. He wouldn’t ask about the thing that had gripped her, not unless she offered—and she was quite content to skirt around her reasons for finding herself out of bed in the middle of the night.

“You were—” she began, pointing her thumb over her shoulder in the direction of her home.

“Aye.”

Morgana raised an eyebrow. “At this hour? How forward of you, General.”

Raubahn stepped closer, a smile pulling at his lips as he shook his head. “I have need of that title no longer,” he said, and reached for her hand. A frown pulled at his peaceful expression as he touched her cool skin, but he went on: “Nanamo has freed me from my obligations to Ul’dah. I stand before you now as a man whose only duty is to Ala Mhigo.”

It felt like watching the clouds part after looking at an ashen sky for so long that she had forgotten what lay beyond—the raising of a pall. Morgana let out a breath that had lingered in her lungs for weeks, forgetting her burdens and the openness of the streets, and threw her good arm around his shoulders. Raubahn stumbled back from the impact but held fast to her, the rumble of his quiet laughter rolling against her chest.

“What will you do now?” Morgana asked as she pulled back to look at his face, at the easy—if weary—lines around his eyes.

“I can’t say she gave me much time to ponder the question of my future before handing it to me, but I thought I ought to consult with the foremost sellsword I have had the honour of fighting with regarding my options.”

Morgana raised an eyebrow, easing into playfulness in a way that surprised even her. “You, a sellsword?”

“I’ve yet to forget how to swing a sword,” Raubahn said.

“I’m sure we’ll think of something to do with you.”

Morgana tugged him back towards her door, pushing down on the lingering discomfort that called her to the old theatre. This moment should belong to her, and she refused to let it land in the hands of a spectre.

But it felt like the tolling of a bell. If Raubahn no longer was what remained of the Alliance in Ala Mhigo, it would soon be time for Morgana to lay bare all the things she had been keeping from him—and as the fevered memory of the gallows dug into her mind, she felt as though she would be the one facing judgement.


	15. REPENT, O YE SINNERS

As he stepped out of the vine-covered door of the old theatre, Ilberd closed his eyes and turned his face up towards the sun. The wind bore the taste of salt up from the Lochs, and below his feet, the cobblestones were still damp from the morning’s rain. It made the air thick with wet heat as the sun pushed past the clouds, a proper summer smell he’d long since forgotten.

The dead had seemed to speak from beyond that sealed door in his makeshift cell. He’d traced the flower sigil with his fingers over and over again, struggling to remember the name of its shape from the herbalist’s book Nedric had all but memorized by age ten. There was no dredging the answer from his mind; the memory had bled out of him with time, along with so many little things he only knew for their absence. The hours down in the cell had been an agony, each and every one, and Ilberd was glad to stand with the sky above his head and the voices of the living all around.

“Oi,” Morgana said, her cold voice cutting through the humid air. “Get your head out of the clouds.”

Arroway had a strange knack for reminding a man dying in every way but the physical that he was alive. Once, it had been the light of her—the strange, cutting radiance of the blessing, rather more like the gleam of a blade than some benevolent saint’s halo. Since then, Ilberd had made a habit of brushing against the vicious thorns at her edges. Every drop of blood she drew with words or blade served as a reminder, a spark to ignite dying embers.

“If it’s an obedient corpse you want,” Ilberd shot back without even realizing it, “you ought to dirty your hands and do the killing first.”

“Let’s not be impatient. I’m sure it’ll become a possibility before the day is out.”

Morgana was a hard woman, and she was certainly vicious, but still bafflingly incapable of cruelty. She’d kept him well fed for as long as she played the gaoler; it offended her to see his bones poking through the parchment of his skin, and she made no effort to visit any indignities on his weakened state. For all her words and all her scorn, she kept him rather safe.

Not that Ilberd would ever deign to thank her for it—she didn’t want it, besides, and it would shame them both. They were beasts clawing at the world of the living in their hatred of the world of the dead, and they had no gratitude to give for a modicum of humanity.

He didn’t know that he had any gratitude left in him. For the warmth underneath his feet that reminded him that he stood on Ala Mhigan soil once more? For the vibrant life that kept the streets noisy, gorged on hard-won freedom? For the effort Morgana put into hating a dead man?

She walked two steps in front of him, her spine taut with purpose; she was unafraid as she guided Ilberd through streets whose secrets he’d long since forgotten. Why would she concern herself with watching his every move? It was clear to them both he had nowhere to run, no impulse for it. In his time underneath the ground, he had spent hours wondering whether some part of him had died with Yiazmat when that boy Sairsel took it apart, fading into nothing along with Morgana’s Echo—and perhaps it had. But the rest of him knew it didn’t matter; he knew when he had truly died, and he knew that this death had only been incomplete so long as he could still fight for Ala Mhigo.

And Morgana knew it, too. She had known it long before Yiazmat ever weaved the fabric of her fate into his.

“Where is your boy?” Ilberd asked as a screaming child passed them, chasing another down a set of timeworn stairs.

Morgana’s shoulders stiffened. “Why do you ask? Feeling the need to beat down on someone weaker than you to reassure yourself that you’re still man enough for it?” she snapped.

“Oh, aye. That boy is certainly the weakling he was on the Wall after killing a god and driving the viceroy to suicide,” Ilberd said flatly. 

“That’s no answer.”

“He is the first thing I remember since Yiazmat,” he admitted, but it didn’t feel right to speak of. He cleared his throat to steady himself. “I wondered if you would involve him in this, too—for the sake of seeing things through.”

“He was off for Doma last I saw him. Sairsel doesn’t say things he doesn't mean; if he said he was done with you, he meant he was done with you.”

“It’s strange how like his mother he can be,” Ilberd said, unable to keep the contempt from his tone.

Of course Morgana bristled. “Right. The unworthy mother who abandoned her son and doesn’t know who he is—that’s me. Do you plan on finding some new insults before they hang you, or should I expect that you’ll beat me over the head with this one for the rest of your days?”

“I’ll think of something.”

“And you used to be so clever,” Morgana retorted. She fell silent as the royal palace came into view, skirting around the street that led to its proud doors and the Resistance soldiers guarding them.

But her steps were decisive, devoid of hesitation as she always was—she wasn’t a shifty shadow-dweller skittering out the view of her—former?—honest comrades. If Ilberd had her right, she merely considered herself a woman handling some private affair away from prying eyes and running mouths whose questions she wasn’t beholden to answer in the first place. Being Warrior of Light had habituated her to stomping through the world, sword in hand, and doing whatever the hells she wanted.

Had it been otherwise, she may not have dared to sequester him while Ala Mhigo built herself a new government from nothing but ashes—and the Alliance likely would have long since hanged him. A chill crept up the length of Ilberd’s spine at the thought; it had haunted his dreams more than enough.

The half-wall Morgana had him climb was sun-warmed underneath his fingers, a blessed reminder of the world that was. They cut through an offshoot of the royal gardens, only recently left to its own wilderness: a stark white flag dangled limply from a sliver of pole that had been caught in the ravages of a cannonball. The sight of it set Ilberd’s blood ablaze.

“Give me a knife,” he said.

“Do you take me for a fool?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Ilberd snapped. “If I’d wanted to gut you, I would have tried until one of us was dead.”

Morgana rolled her eyes and tossed her dagger at his feet, its point buried squarely in the coppery grass. Ilberd didn’t thank her as he picked it up; neither did he use it to slice at his bonds. It felt more like freedom to tear the imperial flag to shreds. Though he was long since without claws, the mere illusion of it—brief as it was—was something he took like a gift. Every tear he made in the fabric, he ripped with his own two hands.

“Feel better, now?” Morgana asked boredly as he put the knife back in her hand, giving the tatters of the flag a look that betrayed her satisfaction.

Ilberd swallowed, his throat tight and his breath bitter on his tongue. “Aye.”

“Well, come on, then. Twelve.” 

She turned away and crossed the rest of the gardens with a pretense of displeasure still clinging to her, but she understood. And once more, Ilberd followed with stone closing around his heart and a dizzying rush of violence washing over his mind.

It came to nothing; he was thankful for it. Morgana guided him inside the palace through a collapsed section of wall on the eastern promenade, walking through without so much as a glance over her shoulder.

“Any madman can simply walk into the palace. That seems safe,” Ilberd said, his voice filling the empty air.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Morgana said. “We’re aware of all the security breaches; the masons are working from dawn to dusk to fix the whole bloody city. No one outside the Resistance knows about this one.”

As they neared the end of the corridor, Morgana’s gait stiffened—barely noticeably. She pointed to a burst of blackened stone surrounded by thick trails of dried blood, only half washed off. “That’s where I nearly lost my arm. The imperials had us penned in—so they thought. We held until Sairsel and the others reached Zenos, and then we slaughtered every last one of them.”

Hearing of the battle put Ilberd in a strange state—as though he had no right to it, to this brutal sort of intimacy belonging only to those who had fought and bled. Why did Morgana offer it so freely? To lodge a blade between his ribs?

“How did it happen?” he asked quietly, testing the boundaries. “Your arm.”

Morgana shrugged. Ilberd’s gaze followed her right hand down the ugly spider web of burned flesh that made up most of her left arm, the scars still fresh.

“Magitek blast; I didn’t have a shield. Nothing all that fascinating about it.”

There was strength in gazing upon a place of pain unflinching and walking away with head held high; Ilberd knew this because he had not had the strength to reclaim power from his places of pain. He had turned away from the smouldering ruin of his home and never looked back; when they took the Wall, he had scarcely even glanced at the highlands on the other side; and even now, when he asked himself where he might run should he free himself from Morgana, the thought of returning to Coldhearth made him feel ill.

In this, Morgana was stronger than him: she stared at the place that remembered her screams knowing that it had not broken her, and she walked on past it because she still could. Ilberd followed her through the darkened, silent corridors with an awareness of her that felt like an exposed bone. He resented her strength far more than he had ever held her weaknesses in judgement—and throughout every battle, every cursed step he took, he had thought this judgement of her absolute.

“This is it,” Morgana said, stopping before a set of plain double doors: the place that would be the first step towards judgement of him. She lifted a hand to knock, paused, and turned to Ilberd with a gaze like a guillotine. “If you try anything in there, I will take your head myself and make certain your memory never knows peace. Are we understood?”

What could she do to his memory that he had not already ruined? Ilberd released a breath through his nose, the sharpness gone from him. “Understood, Arroway.”

That seemed to satisfy her: she gave the door three quick raps to announce her presence, then pushed it open.

Ilberd had expected a room populated with the strangers who made up Ala Mhigo’s would-be government. He had expected to answer to the whole of his people, to face judgement from every last man and woman he had ignored in his fury for a homeland that was more memory than nation—he had expected to face it all with the remnants of his pride and go to his death with his eyes closed to the future.

Instead, he walked two steps inside the sparse office—empty of the jury he deserved—and froze, taken by the first real spark of instinct that urged him to run since he had awoken alone on the Royal Menagerie. And there was no turning away from this, no cowardice that he could choose over old hatred; Morgana stood behind him, guarding the doors and forcing him to face the past.

Raubahn stared at him—unbroken, in spite of his best efforts. It was all Ilberd could do to meet the steel of his gaze, to search for something he recognized there. Was he a mirror of who Raubahn had been in Halatali—an open book of shame and brokenness, a stray bereft of pride? Ilberd refused to show it, but many things were long beyond his reach even inside himself.

The seconds crept by along the silence, only a spare few grains of sand slipping through before Raubahn’s body went into motion. He crossed the room with heavy, decisive steps, and though Ilberd braced himself, it wasn’t enough. Raubahn’s fist cracked hard against his jaw in a swing that bore all his weight.

Ilberd stumbled back, and it shamed him to feel Morgana’s hand at his back to keep him from crashing into her.

“Easy,” she said. He didn’t have to look at her to know how bloody pleased she was, but he righted himself quickly enough, and he could hardly think past the harsh blossom of pain that reverberated all the way down to the bone.

Some part of him soared; pain meant he was not entirely a husk yet. Pain meant there was some payment to give in blood. It meant—

All the breath went from his lungs all at once as though he had been struck a second time, but Raubahn’s hand was no longer a fist. He embraced him as a brother, a heavy arm around his shoulders. The absence of his left arm sickened Ilberd enough to make the gods laugh.

There was nothing to do with his bound hands useless between them. There was nothing to say, either—and so Ilberd merely stood against the roiling current, scrabbling some breath back into his lungs like a drowning man.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just a note that there will be no update this coming tuesday! the next chapter is fairly chunky (both in length and content) and i want to take the time to get it all up to snuff - also, it's patch day, we'll all be dying anyway. see you all next thursday, and thank you to everyone who's been reading and commenting and sharing on social media! i see you and i love you. 💞


	16. THE WHEEL

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning: minor use of ableist language in narration.

“Say something,” Morgana said.

Raubahn did not speak; he barely even would look at her, busy pacing a hole into the floor of his office as he was. What strange relief she had seen on his face had gone the moment he’d had to order Ilberd sent to a cell. The secrecy weighed on him, she knew, but it was a necessity; the Butcher alone had stirred up enough trouble. If the mobs calling for her blood were to learn that the Griffin was her neighbour, not one of Raubahn’s wise words would be heard above the riot.

Morgana had enough sense not to voice her opinion that they should let the people have him. She couldn’t begin to understand whatever Raubahn felt for Ilberd now—and if the look on his face was any indication, he himself did not understand it, either—but she could appreciate the complexity of the matter in his heart and avoid tasteless remarks.

Still, this silence was like to drive her mad. She turned her smallest knife around and around in her hands, every motion restless and devoid of purpose. It was enough to make her feel like she was the one stuck in chains. 

“Raubahn.”

“I do not know what to say, Morgana,” he said, his steps slowing to come to a hesitant halt. “I mourned the man he was. I condemned and took responsibility for what he became.”

“You tortured yourself because he needed you to excuse his own cowardice,” Morgana corrected.

Raubahn sighed silently at that and let his shoulders drop, but didn’t argue. Morgana hated how Ilberd had taken the fight out of him. 

“I never would have thought…”

“It was simpler when he was dead.”

For all that she thought she knew Raubahn like no other, the silence with which he met her words was a cold, thick fog. She couldn’t read his gaze—quicksilver with anger, with guilt, with doubt. Morgana’s hands stilled on the knife when the blade touched her skin, nearly nicking her.

“Aye,” Raubahn said at last.

“Make it simple again, then,” Morgana said, wearing down her hard edges; stripping down her words to lessen the blow. “What else can we do with a traitor? He needs to be judged.”

“He needs to be judged,” Raubahn agreed calmly. “But you know it cannot be simple; not for us. Never again.”

Morgana frowned. Her grip tightened around the knife, the blunt edge of the blade digging into the flesh of her thumb.

“What do I know? It _has_ to be. I was there; you know I was. I watched him offer up those lives to make that monster. He would have taken mine, my son’s— I watched him take your bloody arm.”

“I need no reminding of what he’s done,” Raubahn said, sharp and frayed.

“Then you know there’s only one way for this to end!” 

“He lives.” The words came with the decisiveness of an executioner’s blade. Mere fact, and still it cut Morgana’s breath short to hear it so; Raubahn watched her carefully, then spoke once more, balanced on the line between pacifying and categorical. “I know you, Morgana: if you wanted him dead, you would have presented me with a corpse.”

She wanted him dead. She had wanted him dead from the moment she felt his breath under her on the Royal Menagerie, and she wanted him dead still.

But she couldn’t do it alone—not this. Morgana was no stranger to her own selfishness, but in this, at the very least, she knew this revenge was not hers alone to take. It belonged to Raubahn, to Sairsel, to Wilred and all the dead of the Wall and the people left behind to mourn them.

Her reasons were clear, but Raubahn saw something else in her. When she tried to catch a glimpse of it, she may as well have been trying to count birds against the sun. The justifications she wanted to give—should have given—died in her throat.

“Tell me—I want to know if you believe he has a life left to reclaim,” Raubahn said quietly, every word desperate in honesty.

Morgana licked her lips, feeling as though her mouth were filled with sand. All she could think of was Ilberd on the battlements of Revenant’s Toll, his deep blue coat folded beside him over the stone—and the memory that should have belonged to him alone. She could almost taste the summer air, the choking stink of smoke and ash.

“He’s been dead for as long as I’ve known him,” she said.

The blade of her knife slipped along the side of her finger, cutting a thin red line into her skin.

Late-afternoon sunlight crawled across the tiled floor inside the Hall of the Griffin, cutting slashes of bright gold into the mosaics. Its fingers stopped just short of the table in the centre of the hall where the council gathered, drowning in the cold silence of anticipation.

No man sat the throne, now draped in the purple banner of the Resistance—that Rhalgr’s star may serve as a reminder to all those who would gaze upon the seat of the last king of Ala Mhigo: a reminder that the Resistance had been born from the people’s will long before imperial airships darkened their skies, tempered in the blood of the King of Ruin’s reign.

They would never forget the fight. They would never again submit.

Still, it was no easy task to rebuild a nation; some meetings saw more unity than others. Today, the council sat in uneasy silence, cold enough to drown the whole room and all the warmth of the sunlight in it. They all knew what they had come to discuss, and the onus of initiating such a conversation was more a burden than a privilege.

“As you are all aware,” said the commander, for there was no hiding this from the leaders nor their people, “Ilberd Feare, who operated under the alias of the Griffin as instigator of the assault on Baelsar’s Wall, has recently been found here in Ala Mhigo and apprehended.”

None in the council expressed surprise, but prior knowledge did not preclude the need to have the words spoken—like the lancing of a boil.

And Raubahn could only go on, his spine straight as a pillar and his shoulders tense. “Given the sensitive nature of the situation, I’ve convened this extraordinary session that we may settle on a course of action as quickly as possible. The people will want an answer, and they will want their voices heard.”

More of that terse silence met his words—the sort that preceded an eruption of chaos. Noisy arguments were the Mhigan way, but this was different; the whole council sat in each other’s discomfort, in the miasma of personal feelings and responsibility.

The first to speak was Bertliana of Little Ala Mhigo. “What is he like now?”

“Defeated,” Raubahn said uneasily, sparing the barest glance towards the woman who stood at his left shoulder, a few steps removed from the council table. “He has made no attempt at resisting his arrest nor his imprisonment.”

Bertliana thought on it for a moment. She looked towards the woman sitting across from her—the warden of the Undercity and leader of the Riskbreakers—as though looking for guidance, but Ashelia was quiet with a frown of simmering anger and fixated on a groove in the table.

“He wanted to free Ala Mhigo so badly that he would murder his own to do it, didn’t he?” Bertliana said, and it was clear to more than one at the table that she did not speak of the Wall alone. “I say we make him show that he can serve it.”

“You mean that we should set him free like he’s innocent?” asked Stark Woad of Radiata with a disbelieving frown.

Bertliana shrank, ever so slightly—she was still young. “Not free, necessarily, but…”

“We may take the example of Fordola Lupis into consideration,” Raubahn said. “According to our reports, her conscription has given the Resistance a rare and precious asset. She is not a free woman, but she serves Ala Mhigo.”

“But Fordola’s Resonant abilities make her indispensable,” said Lyse, speaking for Rhalgr’s Reach. Her caution regarding her personal connection to Fordola was writ clear across her face. “I’m not saying we should or shouldn’t go down that path—only that it… went down easier than trying to convince everyone that she deserves a chance to make things right. So to speak.”

Tibost of the Ala Mhigan Quarter tapped thick fingers on the table, a distracted staccato to punctuate his thoughts. “Is this your official position, Commander? Conscripting the Griffin like we did the Butcher?” he asked.

Raubahn took in a long breath before addressing the council again. “I cannot claim objectivity in this; as I’m sure you have all heard, Ilberd and I have a history. I carry my share of guilt in his actions, and I have my own grievances. My voice is that of only one man on this council, but…” Another deep breath. “Aye. That is my official position.”

The woman who stood by him tightened her crossed arms and bit down hard on the inside of her cheek, but said nothing. It was not her place.

It was that of Raganfrid. Ala Gannha’s elder stood, his weathered face set with deep lines—anger and loss, and laughter, too, though it was all too easy to forget. He placed both hands on the table, and all the others looked at him.

“I won’t give you all the names of my youths who died at the Wall. I know full well that you all know the weight of a name—it’s the Griffin who should hear them,” Raganfrid said, his calm voice belying the depths of his feelings. “Thirteen boys and girls left Ala Gannha never to return. The eldest of them had just seen her twenty-sixth nameday. The youngest was but fourteen.”

Lyse averted her gaze, heavy with the memory of her own loss.

“For their sake, I can only say one word: justice. He must hang,” Raganfrid concluded before lowering himself back down onto his seat.

The hissing tones of the Vira representative cut through the silence just as it fell: “The elder speaks true. If we are to discourage primal summonings, there must be consequences. For strider and Ananta alike.”

“Justice and consequences don’t have to mean death,” Bertliana spoke up once more. “Is that our only recourse? Blood for blood—even if it means spilling that of our own?”

Ashelia’s distant anger found its way back to the hall, her silence breaking all at once. “Bertliana’s right,” she said, quiet but sure. “‘Liberty or death.’ We all lived and fought by those words so that we could be here today—and so did he. Who are we now if we give death to the man who paved the way for our liberty?”

“We wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for his actions,” Lyse agreed cautiously. “The Alliance and the Scions wouldn’t have moved into Gyr Abania and the Resistance would have… It isn’t an easy one to face, but it is the truth.”

Another uncomfortable silence fell over the council—a sea of roiling anger, of grief, and for some, of guilt. Ashelia was steady as she spoke up once more. 

“What he did was horrifying and unconscionable. I will never forgive nor forget it; none of us will. But we must look to the future.”

“If I may,” the standing woman said, terse and cold.

Lyse nodded. “Rhalgr’s Reach recognizes Morgana Arroway.”

They all knew the stories: Morgana was the one who had fought the Griffin to the far edge of fate. She had been a captain of the Resistance, their Warrior of Light; she was falling into the role of the commander’s right hand. No one opposed her speaking.

“It was me who put Feare in chains. The only reason I didn’t put my sword through his heart was so that all of Ala Mhigo could have justice—not me alone,” she said heavily. “He needs to be _punished._ If you won’t give him death, give him exile.”

“Isn’t that far too easy?” Ashelia asked, incredulous.

“Is it? Ala Mhigo is everything he has left. That is how a man does what he did—when he has nothing else to lose. Take that away, and you’ve given him death without spilling a drop of his blood.”

“That sounds to me like base revenge. And personal,” Ashelia added pointedly.

“This is personal for everyone. It helps no one to pretend otherwise.” 

“I never did. I only mean that we can’t all speak only for ourselves here.” Ashelia glanced to the rest of the council. “But if it came to execution, I would gladly swing the axe to behead him myself. That’s all.”

“You’ll have to get in line, Grand Steward,” Morgana said before stepping back—for once, there was no venom in her words, but rather some strange solidarity.

The commander shifted forward in his seat. “If there are no more proposals or arguments to be made,” he said, carefully watching the rest of the table, “I move that we put the matter to a vote.” 

The council muttered agreements, and he took a breath. 

“Let us begin with Ala Gannha’s proposition. All in favour of execution, say ‘aye.’”

The Hellsguard did well to hide the tremor in her hands as her fingers crawled over the heavy ring of keys, quick as a spider. Her eyes darted to the lock, just briefly, and her shoulders bunched together as she found the key that unlocked it.

Raubahn knew to read bodies—restrained movement could speak more clearly than a heavily signalled strike, and she was silently announcing her anxious weariness like a battle cry.

“Singing Basin, is it?” he asked carefully. Her grip around the key ring tightened reflexively, pausing halfway to sliding the key into the lock, and she peered out at him from under the shadow of her beaked hood. “Have you been sleeping?”

“I— Sir, I’m all right.”

Raubahn nodded, but didn’t say that it was as he thought. “Go get some rest. Tell Hasland to have someone ready to take your post in a quarter bell.”

“Shouldn’t I send someone to stand guard in the meanwhile?” Singing Basin asked unsteadily. “Sir?”

“That won’t be necessary.”

Her gaze jumped from the door to Raubahn’s left side, so brief that he was content to pretend he hadn’t noticed it. Diligently hiding her discomfort, Singing Basin unlocked the heavy cell door and opened it with a weighted pull.

“Your prisoner, Commander. Next watch’ll be here in a quarter bell,” she said, ducking her head.

“Thank you.”

Raubahn paused at the edge of the light that crept into the darkened cell until Singing Basin had gone, then stepped inside. He had no desire to stand on the other side of the door and look down; he dragged a chair inside and closed it behind him.

“‘Commander,’” Ilberd drawled after a moment, his derision almost instinctual. There was no bite in it; whatever he had once been, its teeth were gone. “You’ve moved up in the world again.”

“I am proud to serve however Ala Mhigo needs me.”

Ilberd did not budge as Raubahn lowered himself into the chair; he simply lay on his cot, both hands folded over his ribs, and stared up at the stone ceiling of his cell. Raubahn found it hard to look at him for very long, and as his gaze tipped up towards the ceiling, he couldn’t help but wonder what shameful display he must have given Ilberd when their places were reversed.

A cripple who had barely given a fight. Broken shards of a man, held together only by grief-laden fury—the faithful hound with nothing left to cling to; no purpose, no pride.

“Here we are again,” Raubahn said quietly, looking for the rage in Ilberd.

He recognized the current within him because it was the same that flowed through Morgana—but with Ala Mhigo freed, it was stunted. Without focus or purpose to hone it like a blade, it could only move in halting fits and starts, a vestigial limb no more useful than the stump of Raubahn’s arm. He feared it would keep on hungering for the rest of their days, consume them slowly until there was nothing left.

“You’re too good to do to me what I did to you, aren’t you?” Ilberd asked without looking at him.

“It has little to do with goodness. I haven’t the heart for it,” Raubahn said. He shifted in his seat as though it might relieve the unease that lay inside him. “You were my brother, Ilberd, and I let you down—you had every right to resent me.”

A frown pulled at Ilberd’s features. “You let me down?”

“Lolorito told me. The faith you had in me—”

“ _Lolorito_ told you?” Ilberd said with a scoff, finally sitting up. Finally looking like something that was more than a ghost of himself. For a moment—one brief, fleeting moment—Raubahn thought he could almost glimpse the man who had drunk with him so many times in their youth, always ready for a fight. “Bloody rat bastard.”

Raubahn chuckled weakly. “I can think of a few more words.”

“I should’ve let you cut him in half like Teledji,” Ilberd said. The faint smile on his lips, rueful as it was, did not last. What unity they found could only be a bridge; the schism between them would never be whole again. As Ilberd tilted his head back against the wall of his cell and spoke again, the resentment still alive and well, Raubahn knew it would always be so. “You still wouldn’t have done a thing, would you?”

Honesty scratched at Raubahn’s throat like fingers scrabbling to choke him. He could have tried to fool Ilberd, could have tried to fool himself and say that all it took for him to let go of Ul’dah would have been to free Nanamo of the schemers who would hold her strings, but a lie wouldn’t serve.

It had taken the horror of Ilberd’s actions to spur him to action with the rest of the Alliance—it had taken the worst to make him come home. He would bear the shame of it for the rest of his days. After the last twenty years, what burden could shame be?

“No. I wouldn’t,” he said softly.

Something in Ilberd shifted—not into place, but into something less jagged, perhaps. A liberation of a sort. This time, when he managed a shadow of a smirk, he merely looked tired.

“You’re a more honest gaoler than Morgana.”

Raubahn’s head snapped up to look at him. “What?”

“She’s always lying to herself. And stubborn as a bloody mule about it.”

“What do you mean, gaoler?” Raubahn pressed.

Ilberd’s expression shifted into understanding. “She didn’t tell you,” he said, shaking his head with a breathy chuckle. “What did she say? That she’d just found me when she brought me out here?”

“More or less,” Raubahn said stiffly.

“She found me the moment I was free of Yiazmat. The day of the liberation. I believe it pleased her to keep me in chains until she could decide what she wanted to do with me.”

Raubahn ran his hand over his jaw, frowning as his mind ran through the whirlwind of the past few weeks. Since the liberation—and until Lyse named him commander. Morgana had bided her time.

“She kept you alive this long,” he said at last, though the words did little to abate the tension that had settled into his shoulders.

“Killing me only the once in a dank cell would have left her wanting,” Ilberd said simply, looking down at his hands. “I imagine it will be more satisfying once it becomes a public execution.”

All at once, the way Raubahn understood this moment shifted entirely: Ilberd saw it as a thing of finality. Perhaps their last conversation before he walked out to meet the hangman’s noose, or the sword.

“Ilberd, there will be no execution.”

It was Ilberd’s turn to look at him with incredulity narrowing his eyes, pulling his mouth downwards. 

“ _What?_ ”

“I came to tell you that the council had met to discuss your fate. It was not easy,” Raubahn said calmly. “But it became clear to me, as it did to many others, that such a meeting was no replacement for a trial—and that we do not yet have a nation that can hold proper trials.”

“What need is there for a trial?” Ilberd snapped. “No one has any doubt of my guilt—least of all you or Morgana or, hells, Curtis’ girl—”

It should have come as no surprise that Ilberd awaited death; Raubahn had stood at the edge of the platform from which he leapt at Baelsar’s Wall, stared down at the place of his fall thinking him dead. He had known that Ilberd’s sacrifice had never been meant to lead him back to Ala Mhigo.

In loss, there had been clarity, but holding him again had given Raubahn hope—though he realized, as the shock sank through him, that he did not know what it was he hoped for.

“I haven’t forgotten Curtis’ words,” Raubahn said, heavy and low. “Dying is easy, Ilberd—”

Ilberd’s voice came sharp as a blade. “Don’t.”

“Living is harder. We both know this.” Ilberd looked away, but Raubahn went on: “My parting words to the council were that execution would have been easy indeed—but there will be no easy answers in rebuilding Ala Mhigo. Living with the past will be harder than a single act of revenge, but it is the only path forward.”

“They’re pretty enough words, aye,” Ilberd said coldly.

Raubahn stood. “Perhaps that is all they are. But the decision’s been made: in the coming weeks, you will be conscripted into the Resistance as part of its nascent penal unit—” he ignored the dry bark of laughter that escaped Ilberd’s lips— “and a handler will be assigned to watch over you in the field. I will directly oversee you in your duties.”

“Will it ease your conscience to have me serve as magitek fodder rather than deciding to put me to the sword?”

“No more and no less than it would ease your conscience to be sentenced to death, I imagine,” Raubahn said simply. He pounded the side of his fist to the cell door, then turned to Ilberd one last time. “I know there is some fight left in you. Ala Mhigo needs it still.”

The door opened with a heavy, yawning groan. As a sliver of light touched his cot, Ilberd sat still and did not move until he heard the key turn in the lock, the dark washing over him once more.

“Since when do I need an escort to your office?” Morgana asked as she strode in.

Raubahn looked up from a small mountain of paperwork with the look of a man who had forgotten the world at large. He set down his quill and pressed a knuckle between his eyebrows. “I only asked the private to find you and send you my way.”

“Ah. The moon eyes explain it, then.”

“You may no longer consider yourself Warrior of Light, but it makes you no less a legend in their eyes. I am not surprised that a youth who’s never met you may want to jump at the chance to walk with you.”

“Says the legend,” Morgana said lightly, crossing her arms.

The ghost of a smile played at Raubahn’s lips, but he kept on an air of professionalism that Morgana was no longer used to seeing when they were alone. “Sit,” he said, gesturing to the chair across from his. “I did want to speak to you in this capacity—as a warrior whose great deeds precede her, fate-walker or no; as a sellsword.”

“I’m listening, Commander,” Morgana said as she sat.

He already had her interest; she had been champing at the bit for a way to busy herself since the council had decided to forgo a death sentence for the Griffin. It itched at her skin, made her want to charge headlong into anything that would hit back, to break down the claustrophobic walls she felt closing around her a little bit more every day. She would not be surprised to know that Raubahn saw through her in this as easily as he did everything else.

“To put it simply: I mean to keep you on in your capacity as a sellsword. I know you have no great love for the military—but the Resistance is not the Flames, and I will make certain of that. I need a right hand. Someone I can trust.”

“You don’t want another Roaille; I understand that,” Morgana said, careful. She wasn’t certain whether there was still a wound to drive a knife into, but she didn’t want to risk it. Another Roaille, another Ilberd. He was too good a man for so much betrayal. “I’m still not very good at much more than hitting things, and with the arm, even that—”

“I know. But during the campaign, and in the last few weeks, we made good comrades, didn’t we? I won’t ask for more than the Scions did.”

“They would be hard to surpass,” Morgana said, her dry chuckle flowing with an undercurrent of bitterness.

“I mean that this can be temporary. If you wish to leave, I won’t hold you back.”

Morgana tapped two fingers on the side of her knee, considering Raubahn’s earnest gaze. “Would it look like the last few weeks? Guard your back, stand in meetings, offer my infinite wisdom?”

“Just about, aye,” Raubahn said with the ghost of a smile. “I shouldn’t mind having a sword with opinions.”

“Mm. We can try.”

“Good. Good,” Raubahn said, nodding. His shoulders came free of some tension, but not entirely; something remained.

“What is it?” Morgana asked. She saw through him, too.

“In the interest of trust, there is something I must ask.”

She frowned. “All right.”

“Did you take it upon yourself to imprison Ilberd in the weeks following the liberation?”

Morgana huffed out a breath. So the bastard had talked—either that, or her bastard had, but Sairsel had been clear enough when he distanced himself from the matter entirely, and though he was a great many things, he was not a talker.

For the first time since this whole thing had begun, Morgana began to feel that she had done wrong. It was a strange sort of regret, brand new and unexpected; she had felt so sure, but now all that lingered was dishonesty.

“I did,” she said. She, too, was a great many things—and if a liar she was, then so be it—but she did not shy away from her own actions. “I found him on the Royal Menagerie. Kept him somewhere he wouldn’t be able to run or be found.”

The hardest part was watching Raubahn separate himself—his heart—from the mantle of commander, doing everything he could to mask the disappointment on his face. “Why?”

“Simply put? I didn’t trust the Alliance with him,” Morgana said, and there was no hiding the implication that hung at the ends of those words: that she hadn’t trusted him. They both knew it. “I’ve seen the way they work, acting like everything that goes on in any nation is their concern unless they don’t want to get involved. It took weeks before they trusted that we could take care of our own country like bloody grown-ups; if I’d delivered Ilberd, I would’ve been delivering the Alliance his head.”

“That’s not—”

“His accomplices are to be hanged, aren’t they?”

Raubahn frowned, and it took a few heartbeats for the words to properly form. “Did you not think I would have spoken for him? For the right of the Ala Mhigan people to decide on his fate?”

“How was I supposed to know, Raubahn? It took being _told_ to make you stay!”

It wasn’t the most honourable blow; Morgana was aware of that. She hadn’t known how to blunt her edges in two decades, and now she regretted it. Raubahn’s jaw ticked. She took a breath, trying to find the words that might form some sort of apology without relenting, but he spoke first.

“You know I only ever wanted the best for Ala Mhigo—even when I thought to return to Ul’dah.”

“I know,” Morgana said, indulgent. “But what could I have done? I trusted you then as much as I trust you today—but the Flame General? It was either ask him to hide what he knew from the rest of the Alliance or make him stand with me to convince them that Ilberd was Ala Mhigo’s to judge. I didn’t want to have to ask for permission.”

Raubahn’s expression gave her nothing—and certainly not an inkling of how he felt about her answer. With him, she never felt like she stood on shifting sands, but the ground of his office may as well have become the burning desert she had refused to call home for so many years.

It took her like a punch to the gut when he said, “Did you beat him?”

“Not while he was in chains, if that makes any difference,” she said dryly. She wasn’t fool enough not to expect that the question would one day come; when she had brought Ilberd out of the old theatre, the bruises and scrapes she had dealt him on the Royal Menagerie were faded, but the shape of her fingers still coloured his throat and the skin she broke had scabbed over. It was inevitable. “Think what you will of my actions and my decisions, but until today, I gave you deniability. Besides, I don’t see anyone lining up out there to demand the Griffin be treated with humanity, least of all himself.”

“What’s done is done,” Raubahn said, his face the stone of the Peaks.

His silence made Morgana feel as though her muscles, her tendons, her skin were being stretched taut across her bones, as far as they would go. “If you’d rather rescind your offer—”

“I knew who you were when I made it.” He lifted his gaze to hers, steel pinning her down. “As I know that nothing will ever be as personal to you as this is. All I ask is for your honesty—to me, and to yourself.”

“What does that mean?” Morgana asked, frowning. They were both slipping away from these roles born of the confines of the office, back into themselves. Her hard edges felt different with him; he knew them as well as he did the sharpness of his own blade.

“We may have broken the Empire’s grip on our home, but for as long as Ilberd lives, you have a reason to keep your anger alive,” Raubahn said—keen and prudent. He knew it was a hard truth, but he would not let it go unspoken. For her sake. “It is easier to direct it towards him than to divest yourself of something you have known for so many years.”

_We have emptied our own husks and filled them with rage to keep ourselves alive._

Morgana swallowed, trying to dislodge the hard weight caught in her throat; her mouth was dry. She wished she could pry her own ribs open and dig inside herself to scratch away what remained of her Echo, that silent wriggling thread Yiazmat had left corrupted without ever breaking it.

“Bloody hells, Raubahn,” she said weakly, dropping her face into her hands and pressing the pads of her fingers into her eyes—better to let herself be drained than to nourish the violent impulse to hit something. She had been that woman in Thanalan; this didn’t need to follow her home. “Have you got a bottle of arak hidden away somewhere in here?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Morgana huffed. “You’re lousy at being professional.”

“I am certain we’ll adjust,” Raubahn said. The tension in his shoulders finally lessened, and properly this time. Much as Morgana felt as though she were a ship adrift in the midst of a violent storm, it put her at ease to see it. “There is one matter I wish to address with my right hand, if you’ll hear it.”

“All right.”

“I will need to bring my plans to council, but given the response in unofficial discussions, we should come to an agreement on the matter of Ilberd—namely, that I would assign you with overseeing him in the field.”

Morgana barked out a laugh, but it lasted all of a breath before she realized Raubahn was serious. “I don’t mean to be insubordinate, Commander, but did you hit your head?”

“Not recently,” Raubahn said, with only an edge of humour to his voice; nothing more. “I’ve considered this at length; I’ve spoken to Lyse and several other captains in the Resistance asking for names, but I would trust no one with this like I would trust you. I believe you’re past taking revenge, and you certainly would never think to let him go free.”

“As if anyone would want to do that,” Morgana scoffed.

“You would be surprised. Not everyone lost someone at the Wall—and there are some who believe it was necessary. To force the Alliance’s hand,” Raubahn said stiffly. Remnants of his guilt over the inaction that fed Ilberd’s desperation. “Ilberd was formed by Curtis Hext. His time as the Griffin proves, however tragically, that he shares his talent for inspiring men. Who better than a woman who will never be swayed by his words?”

Morgana dug her fingers into the fabric of her trousers. Outside, the wind had been of the raging sort—she could feel herself scratching particles of dust that had stuck to the fabric under her nails. “Why are you so keen on believing I wouldn’t slit his throat the moment you left me alone with him?”

“You held him in secret for weeks and never raised a hand to him for as long as you had him in chains,” Raubahn pointed out, making her regret the admission.

“That was when I thought he would swing. A vote isn’t enough to change my desires.”

Raubahn nodded. He stood, unsheathing the dagger that lay at the small of his back—he kept the half of Tizona she had given back to him by the door while he worked, but he was no fool—to place it in front of Morgana. “The guard on duty is Singing Basin. Tell her to let you in on my orders.”

Morgana reached for the knife; her blood thrummed as she imagined sliding the blade home between Ilberd’s ribs, piercing the soft hollow of his throat like butter, cutting his belly open and reaching inside. She tested the point with the tip of her finger, then the edge. The metal reflected the thin line her own knife had made on her finger, just a few days past, and her insides clenched.

She tossed the dagger back onto the desk and crossed her arms, sinking lower into her chair like a petulant child. “I ought to go and smash his head into the wall just to make you look like a fool.”

“Perhaps,” Raubahn said, slipping the knife back into its sheath with far too satisfied an air to Morgana’s liking.

She got to her feet and leaned over the desk, bracing her hands over the edge. Her insides still ached from the weight of his words, from the weight of Ilberd’s words—she hated men thinking that they knew her better than she knew herself, and she hated that her rage and the grief that had shaped it were so transparent that they were right.

But if she stayed the woman she had been for twenty years, broken and put back together wrong, it would mean the Empire had won.

“I’ll do it,” she said—and this, too, sent her blood rushing, alive and unafraid. It felt like the first step. “But don’t patronize me again.”

Raubahn mimicked her position. “Don’t hide things from me again.”

“Is that an order, Commander?” Morgana asked, bristling and barely certain whether she said it with a light heart.

“Please,” he added gently—a man to his equal.

Morgana let go of her discomfort with a breath, then moved her burned hand to lay over his, her skin taut and pinched with scars halfway to the knuckles.


	17. WHAT AILS YOU, KILLS YOU

Morgana had been many things throughout her life—a daughter and a sister, a sellsword, a gladiator, a rebel. She was a mother regardless of her fitness for it; she was a lover again, impossible as it seemed after so many years; she had always been and would forever remain a killer.

Of all the roles that life had given her—well-suited or ill—she would never have thought she might one day find herself playing at undertaker.

She hadn’t thought she would ever tolerate leaving Gyr Abania again, either—and it surprised her how painless it turned out to be. The very air in East End was thick with memories, with the gnawing fear and the loss, twenty years burned into the earth; but the exaltation, too, even wearying as it was to remember coming home as a shattered spectre, of crossing the Wall again to fight. Now, Castrum Oriens was merely a place of passing, steeped in the past and carved into the present.

Morgana didn’t want or need a homecoming from Eorzea. She wanted the mantle of Warrior of Light to die on this side of the Wall while she rebuilt her life where she belonged, so she sat the cart she’d borrowed from a trader in Ala Mhigo wrapped in a dark cloak befitting her grim task and rarely peered out from the shadows beneath its hood. Unease clung to her the whole way through the Shroud; when the trees grew sparser as she neared the border to Mor Dhona, she breathed more freely.

But she did leave beauty at her back; Sairsel’s eyes had taught her to see that. She felt heavy to the very depths of her ribcage with thoughts of him as she found the house she had only seen in someone else’s memories.

She had left Ala Mhigo while morning was still pale. The sun was already high and burning through the sky as she stilled the cart—and yet all she could see, as though her mind had laid a tapestry over her surroundings, was the memory of ash choking the air and dusting the ground like fine snow. The blue above her, pristine and without clouds to mark its endless expanse, could easily have been blotted red as it had been in the aftermath of the Calamity.

No boots had trod this soil in five years. Morgana slid down with a muted thud on the overgrown earth; the grass had grown knee-high after years of neglect, and the garden—once so lovingly tended—was a borderless tangle of weeds and creeping herbs growing wild in the sun. She could taste bile in the back of her throat as her gaze slid to the blackened ruin of the house. It, too, was beginning to lose the shape of the life it once held while nature reclaimed its place.

Sairsel would think it beautiful, if sad. But Sairsel had not walked in the heart of the father who had come home to children forever silent, the husband who would never again hold the woman he loved in his arms. Sairsel was not in Morgana’s bones—bones that now felt as though they were only half hers and half Ilberd’s, fused together inside Yiazmat’s fury.

Morgana tried to ease the growing emptiness inside her by stoking it with fire—how many children had been lost at Baelsar’s Wall to make Yiazmat a reality? How many brothers and sisters, how many lovers torn apart? She could reach for the familiarity of her rage for an eternity and never find its end; it would not keep her from sinking into grief now.

For a moment, she had known them. She had seen a family when it was whole: a man and a woman in love, a headstrong adolescent girl, boys bright as the sun. Ala Mhigans who had survived the years together—everything her own family would never be. Would Mathias have had Balder’s daring? Had Sairsel been as temperamental as Steorra? Her only child was almost of an age with the girl. Had everything been different, might they have been friends?

Morgana had spent so many years quieting such questions before they ever took shape; they served no one, and especially not a lone woman who wanted only to survive. But she had come here of her own accord. She chose, for once, to face the past—even if it did not belong to her—and there was no turning away from the hot, cutting blade of grief sliding home between her ribs.

It wasn’t her grief to bear, but she took up the shovel at the back of the cart and carried it anyway.

The graves lay at the edge of the field where Ilberd had trained Steorra, each marked with a stone—and Morgana thought of the black rock Raubahn had left at the edge of Gotwin’s grave, never entirely swallowed by the desert.

Here, creeping green threatened each stone—vibrant grasses with their long blades, plush moss inching over grey with the passing of the years. No longer; when nature gained on this place, it wouldn’t hide something that should not be forgotten.

Morgana’s fingers tightened around the shaft of the shovel. After how many men and women and beasts she had put in the ground, a body should be nothing; death should be nothing. But here, she felt it looming, sitting heavy on her shoulder like a playful child all the while threatening to pull her down into the minor abyss down which she stared. She took a breath, pretended that her shovel was a sword, and pierced the earth, five years undisturbed.

She felt like half a monster for disturbing these graves. This place was the only home the children had ever known; this land had seen the boys’ birth. But this was a good thing, Morgana told herself, a kind thing—an honour they all deserved. When all she could do for her family was to take Gotwin’s sword to Bloodhowe along with a scrap of fabric Havisa had embroidered for her, to keep their memory together, she had asked herself whether she should take her brother’s remains home. But without Havisa’s body to lay beside his, it wouldn’t matter whether his bones fed the soil of his birth or that of his death.

This family could be whole where they belonged. It was her last thought before her mind emptied, poured like a bowl into her grim task.

Soon, she uncovered her first glimpse of a shroud. The first of the wrapped bodies was small: one of the boys. Morgana dropped the shovel and sank to her knees, wrongness pushing at her bones as the ghost of the memory that wasn’t hers filled her hands, lowering the body into the earth as she took up his remains. She did not look down at the fabric wrapped around him to see whether there would still be the shape of a face underneath it.

Up onto the cart did the boy go—then his brother, identical in size. Morgana’s burned arm was throbbing by the time she finished disturbing the earth of their mother’s grave, and a silent sob crawled up her throat as she lifted up her bones. She braced herself against the side of the cart with her good arm once she had laid her down beside the boys, trying to steady her breathing and the constant flow of pain.

The last grave took her the better part of an hour, with her left arm worn into uselessness. Morgana wanted it to end—she regretted what she had begun, swore and cursed herself for it now that she could only finish it. She cursed her arm, too, clawing into the dirt with her fingers until she could touch the daughter.

And then she wept and screamed, for the first time, for a family that was not hers. Tears streaked through the dirt on her face as she carried the girl to the cart; the shrieking pain that burned through her bad arm left her weak and shaking by the time she laid the body down beside her mother, a prayer on her lips.

“I’m sorry,” she said—once, twice, thrice, and she didn’t know whether it was for disturbing their rest or simply because they never should have been lost.

Morgana laid a cover over them out of a strange sense of modesty and sat weeping into her dirty hands on the cart until she had no tears left to cry, and then she set off back the way she had come as though she had never been here at all.

What she left behind was not her memories—only someone else’s, and the ruins of an empty house that would fade back into the past.

As the cart with its morbid charge rolled into view of the sleepy little hamlet, the stars stretched thin across the sky—thin as Morgana felt. Above her head, silver dust swept along the curve of black satin as the broad slash of an artist’s paintbrush; a beautiful view, but one she was far too tired to appreciate. She couldn’t welcome the briny taste of night air blowing in from the Lochs, either, busy as she was staying awake and kept miserable by dread.

In the end, it had all worked out perfectly. She had left home at the first brush of dawn on the impulse she’d come to regret almost every hour, leaving a note on her battered kitchen table that she’d had to stab into the wood with her pocket knife for lack of a more appropriate paperweight. She’d had to estimate the time her travels would take, padded generously—foresight she now welcomed, with how long it had taken her to work with her bad arm and to gather her wits afterwards—and left a time she hoped would suit.

It had to be nearing the midnight hour, just as she’d written, but there was nothing romantic or peaceful in it for her. Morgana couldn’t even work up the relief of having reached her destination: her mind was caught up in old memories—all the more exhausting because these, too, were not hers.

The youths gathered outside a house, the firebrand burning bright before them. One boy, no older than Sairsel, steel-eyed and straight-backed even with a crutch under his right arm—military stock, the sort of poor boy king’s men on war chocobos recruited right out of the villages with the promise of a life free of starvation if they gave their bodies and lives to serve Ala Mhigo. Under a good king, it was an honour, but Theodoric was not a good king, and that was why the boy beside the soldier was hungry for the firebrand’s words.

 _Liberty or death,_ screamed the faded paint on the brick of the house. Morgana had been to Coldhearth exactly once, but the words made it feel familiar. 

She looped around the houses, past the young date crops that grew from the barren soil like a brand of hope, and stopped at the lichyard where she had stood with Raubahn the last time once Sairsel and Lyse had gone, new youths alive with the memory of Curtis Hext’s words. Raubahn had looked upon the graves of his family in silence, but Morgana knew that the ghost that weighed on his heart then was not any man nor woman buried here.

A lost soul on the Wall, gone without a body to bury in service of something far greater than a mortal king: Yiazmat’s wings, Yiazmat’s flesh, the ravenous violence in Yiazmat’s heart.

Or so they had thought. The spectre stood beside Raubahn now, flesh and blood wrapped in a hooded cloak to guard against the chill and prying eyes. Perhaps after this, he would finally be able to put some meat back on his bones.

Morgana still couldn’t stand the sight of him, but the thought heartened her—and gods, that drove her mad. She pulled the cart to a stop and hopped down.

They exchanged no greetings; it was too solemn a matter for small talk. Only prayers would do, and she didn’t want to speak them again. Not after laying Gotwin and Havisa’s memory to rest in Bloodhowe; not after this afternoon. Torchlight danced on Raubahn’s grim face, pulling at the shadows on Ilberd’s.

As a courtesy, Morgana pulled back the cover from the cart to save him the trouble, but she didn’t look at the bodies again—she didn’t need to. The weight of their bones felt like it was burned into her arms, as their corpses surely had felt in Ilberd’s for so many years. Wordlessly, she handed him the shovel, and pretended that she couldn’t notice the trembling of his breath and fingers.

“Did he put you up to this?” Ilberd asked quietly, the Coldhearth burr thick with shards of steel in his mouth.

“It was my idea,” Morgana answered like an admission of guilt. She regretted her decision to go through with this more than ever now—what sort of heartless bastard dug up four graves five years buried just to return them to soil that had another name and thought it a kindness?

But Ilberd said, almost rasping now, “Thank you,” and her heart sank with relief and sorrow. 

Morgana walked away from the cart, keen on any distance she could put between herself and the bodies after so many hours spent with them at her back, but not any closer to Raubahn and Ilberd as he turned back towards the gravesite. It was an intimate thing, and she had no right to bear witness to it—the vision the Echo had forced on her in Revenant’s Toll half a lifetime ago had already crossed every boundary there could ever be between them. She had no desire to trespass further regardless of the transgressions Ilberd had visited upon her since.

Raubahn was here, a true friend and brother to hold the torch to light his way under the stars, if unable to help him dig new graves. For that, she thought sourly, Ilberd only had himself to blame. He didn’t deserve that foolish, loyal heart, but Raubahn gave it regardless.

Morgana stubbornly held to the belief that she was not so forgiving.

“I’ll leave you to it,” she said, just barely raising her voice—the words aimed mostly at Raubahn.

Ilberd set the point of the shovel down against the ground, not breaking the earth just yet. The line of his back was taut underneath the cloak, his grip white-knuckled on the shaft of the shovel as he tipped his chin towards his shoulder to speak without looking back.

“Stay,” he said.

Her heart lay too heavy inside the stone walls of her ribcage to feel surprise, but Morgana stayed.

How she understood that this moment was the only thing Ilberd had ever wanted, lying deep at the heart of his desire to see Ala Mhigo liberated, she wasn’t sure she would ever want to know.


	18. THE MELODICS OF MADNESS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter takes place within the undercity, my friend livvy's concept for a hidden society underneath ala mhigo (based on the area of the same name in vagrant story), as featured in her amazing series [godhands](https://onwesterlywinds.tumblr.com/tagged/Godhands/chrono). also mentioned in this chapter is blackram, a character from godhands who, over thirty years before this story's present day, did some pretty fucked up shit. 
> 
> thank you to livvy, once again, for letting me play in her sandbox! i hope you guys enjoy it as much as i did.

“So, you’re Saskia’s Mora,” said Saskia’s Neesa.

Morgana’s jaw felt like it was held together by steel wire. “It’s Morgana.”

“Ah. Big girl doesn’t like nicknames,” Neesa concluded with the warped ghost of a smile.

That woman was gloriously tall—taller than even Morgana—and she had the long limbs of something that had been put together to look like a knife. She was by no means a skinny offshoot or svelte in Saskia’s feline manner; the muscles that drew taut underneath her skin when she lifted her arms and her legs spoke of a lifetime of running, but beside her, Morgana was a battering ram.

The last time another woman had succeeded in making her feel self-doubt crawling along her spine like this had been in the half-year wherein she attempted to be the girl her father would shout at her to be when he judged that her sword-skill was lacking. For a few miserable months, she had tried—the skirts, the dancing, the loose hair that always went into her eyes when she wore it unbraided. She had made herself vulnerable, and the girls to whom this was strength pounced on her weakness like hunters. In their own way, they were warriors, and they had their blades.

Then she met Saskia. Morgana’s hand had been slick with another girl’s blood and her skirt was torn after she’d had enough with their weapons—the poor cunt had made some vile comment about her and Gotwin—and jumped her to show how Arroways did battle. Saskia had pulled her away and wrapped her raw knuckles in cloth, and in that moment, Morgana never wanted to be anyone but the woman Saskia saw in her.

She had come so far, changed so brutally that the woman she was now had to be unrecognizable to Saskia—and still, this bloody Neesa found a way, with her voice and her smile, to make Morgana feel as she once had.

“We don’t need to make small talk,” she said curtly.

“Mm, true. But if a mute guide you wanted, a mute guide you should’ve asked for. Could’ve found you one.”

Too many eyes, too many hands, too many ears and tongues. Tempting as the idea sounded, Morgana had no interest in adding one more middleman to the equation only to have some mute Undercity rat try to stab her in the kidneys the moment she’d handed off a sack of gil she already couldn’t afford. Asking for Saskia’s girl was simple—and if Neesa had one thing in common with Morgana, it had to be that she didn’t want to have to go to Saskia and admit that she’d stabbed the woman she’d introduced her to.

Morgana blew out a breath through her nose and didn’t let her hand stray to any of the blades on her as Neesa led her down the darkened tunnel. Far behind them lay the door marked with the flower underneath the old theatre; Neesa had the key, Saskia said, and Neesa had made certain by some sleight of hand that Morgana never saw it before the door creaked open.

She didn’t like what lay beyond it. The deeper they went, the colder the air seemed to get—and yet still more alive, like a discordant note struck out of time.

There was nothing good to be found in a place that was built out of whispers. Though they were surrounded by cold stone as they descended the murky stair deep below a gutterway, Morgana felt increasingly as though she were stepping into something intangible, something that delighted in being formless. 

_The dead find power in freedom from flesh,_ Saskia’s thaumaturge mother had told her once. That woman understood the fabric of the world and magic like no one else Morgana had ever met, and her words were uneroded by time. _We fear ghost stories because we are trapped in our flesh. If anything, what we should most fear is that which is dead and trapped still._

Rot and undeath. The feeling of it climbed up the stair of her spine with a shudder.

Neesa saw. “You a scaredy, big girl?”

Morgana breathed audibly, making no effort to mask her impatience. This place frayed her nerves, Neesa’s every word felt like she was trying to twist her skin with both hands, and the glow of her lightstone shuddered enough that she mistook its shadows for a wrong thing every three steps.

And all this because Raubahn couldn’t be _officially_ concerned about bloody little Ashelia Riot and her stupid grand plans for the Undercity.

She did not dignify Neesa’s remark with a response. Neesa merely tossed a glance over Morgana’s shoulder, raised an eyebrow, and went on.

At the bottom of the stairs, the rock walls seemed to drink the bluish light of the lightstone, and in that floating twilight the shadows bared six branching paths: one closed by a heavy gate, two by barred doors marked with the nicks of what Morgana supposed was an axe, and three that simply stretched into the nothingness that swallowed them. For once, Morgana paused her lingering fantasy of pushing someone—anyone’s—head through the wall long enough to be thankful for the presence of a guide. If she’d had to pick her way through this place, she would have gone mad.

Neesa did not even hesitate. She dipped into the passage to her right, lifting a hand in habit to touch a finger-sized depression in the corner brick; Morgana almost expected the stone to start rumbling under their feet and produce some secret wall, but nothing came of it. It was only recognition between a woman and the place that had shaped her.

“No one near,” Neesa said halfway inside this new path. “At the end there is the nearest neutral zone to where we’re going. Scouting ahead. On your own from here, big girl.”

“My thanks,” Morgana said sourly.

“Make contact when I know the way. Try not to die ‘til then, Saskia’s Mora.”

Neesa jogged off into the darkness on those bafflingly long legs of hers, so quietly that Morgana could have sworn she was one of the dead things made possible by the Undercity. The silence yawned and stretched like some gleefully ominous feline.

“You may as well have shown her your belly,” Ilberd said at last, his voice sounding like someone trying to untangle a knot. Morgana hated how it almost made her jump.

“If I want my pet chicken’s opinion, Feare, I will certainly ask.”

“And if I wanted a woman who fucked her way into holding my leash, I would go to the brothel.”

Morgana whirled around and grabbed a fistful of Ilberd’s jacket to slam him against the wall of the narrow passage, her grip tight on the knife she flashed at his throat. Her whole body felt tense, as though every death and undeath in the Undercity was a pinprick set deep under her skin.

She did her best to ignore it—to push past how taut Ilberd’s muscles were, too, like an echo of her unspoken discomfort. Better to focus on the easy spark of her anger towards him: familiar, safe, controllable. 

“Tread very carefully, Ilberd. I’m not above telling the council you got your throat slit by some brigands down here.”

Something hard pressed against her side. Morgana glanced down at the point of the blade Ilberd held just under her ribs—not a promise, but a game.

For the first time since she had met him, newly appointed captain to the Braves and so charming she couldn’t see the broken rage behind his eyes, he felt alive—still fragmented, and likely never to be whole again, but alive.

And alive was enough.

“Put down that little oyster knife,” Morgana said coolly, feeling the blunt press of metal more keenly every time new breath filled her lungs, “before I start mistaking it for a real threat.”

Ilberd matched her tone. “Shame.”

It wasn’t relief that animated her blood as the blade left her, but a new flood of wrongness, as though their playacting at violence was the only thing that could hold back the tide. This place felt like the Wall in the hours between Yiazmat’s summoning and its breaking free of the cage: deaths in suspension, like marionette strings dangling in the wind without bodies to animate.

How anyone could bear to live here was beyond her—but perhaps there was a reason why the tunnels beyond Neesa’s door were empty.

Morgana sheathed her knife and stepped away from Ilberd, flexing the fingers of her empty hand as soon as she let go of him. “Maybe I ought to ask the council to give you a pretty little choker like the Butcher’s,” she said, as though it hadn’t sickened her to learn how aptly the thing bore its name. A cruel, cowardly weapon—she preferred the honesty of a good blade.

The wretched girl was almost of an age with her boy, too. A shadow passed across Ilberd’s face at the mention of her—his comrade, so to speak, in the penal unit—but he kept his composure well. 

“And hand me off to a thaumaturge who’ll end me with a snap of his fingers?” Ilberd said. “You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself if someone killed me and you weren’t there to see it.”

“True,” she said dryly, turning away to plunge into darkness with something sharp on her tongue. “So much for that.”

It took a long while to navigate the tunnels until they found other living beings, made longer still by the constant feeling of something wrong pulling at the bones under their skin. When Morgana glimpsed a fire underneath the thinnest opening in the stone ceiling—the barest sliver of natural light from the world above, reinforced against cave-ins by what she imagined was genius work of masonry—she felt herself unravel.

Already too comfortable. She pulled her wariness back around her like a blanket, safe but studded with thorns. Beside her, Ilberd had been the realest thing walking the Undercity until now.

“Do you trust me?” he asked quietly, ready to lengthen his stride and walk ahead of her—as if he’d known that, for one moment, she had trusted him more than she could have stomached being alone in this place.

“No,” Morgana snapped.

Pull the thorns closer around herself, never let him near. Ilberd wasn’t surprised.

“Let me rephrase: do you trust me to speak to that old crone like a good boy?”

Morgana’s gaze followed the line of his nose as he jerked his head towards the fire, finding the crooked ancient standing between flame and scorched stone. Her hair was ash-grey, matted into thick locs and threaded with limestone beads; her dark face was leathery with age, the flames dancing over one cloudy eye. Three of her fingers were severed at the first knuckle—long scarred over. Morgana only realized she had brought her hand to the scars on her left arm, unthinking, when her fingers grazed a patch of still-sensitive skin near her elbow.

“Fine,” she said at last. “I see you draw a blade without provocation, you lose the hand.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Ilberd said dryly.

As he walked past her towards the fire, Morgana considered the likelihood of drawing too much attention to them were she to punch him, but ultimately stood back. Unease slipped into the spaces of her that still remembered that night in Revenant’s Toll as she watched him slip on his dead man’s charisma like a well-worn coat.

“Grandmother,” he greeted, balancing on the narrow line between polite and familiar; he raised a hand and nudged his hood back, just far enough that the shadows wouldn’t obscure his eyes. That was the sort of man he was, without the mask: clever enough to know how to hide in plain sight, how to remove reasons for distrust.

A clean blue outfit. A smooth voice and an easy smile, free of the low-burning agony that lay behind it. _I know what it is to be without hope._

But the people of the Undercity were not so easily tricked as the soft fools on the surface. “Ain’t seen you around here before,” said the old crone, high vowels slipping between stony consonants.

“Harder to walk around freely with imperials milling about like fire ants,” Ilberd replied smoothly. “Beast of a time, eh?”

“Good riddance,” the crone said. The flames flickered and hissed as she spat into the fire. “To thems and the bastards above that licked Garlean prick rather than fight all these years.”

Ilberd crossed his arms and looked into the fire, bobbing his head in a few vague nods. “How have things been around here since they were smoked out? This is a homecoming of sorts for me.”

The old woman did not laugh, but she began clapping her hands—a slow, dry applause. 

“Oh, a blessed homecoming, lad,” she said unenthusiastically. Her good eye, a dark glint in the firelight, flicked over Ilberd’s shoulder to Morgana. “Today was better’n yesterday. Tomorrow might be worse. Never know when hooded strangers come.”

Ilberd glanced over to Morgana, too, but she kept her arms crossed over her chest and said nothing. The crone went on, canny of their hesitation: “I been here through Blackram’s golden years, sonny. Y’ain’t the first and you won’t be the last.”

“Who do you imagine we are?” Ilberd asked. That was too close; Morgana didn’t like it. She made to step forward, but his hand moved low at his side, motioning for her to stay put.

“Three nights ago your friends came,” the crone said, raising her hands and wiggling her fingers in a mockery of dread. “‘The Griffin will come again.’ Hah!” 

Her laugh was dry as dust, sharp as a blade.

“Pardon?”

“Ain’t you heard? Griffin’s dead as a doornail. The Warrior of Light killed him and made the liberator out of his bones,” the crone said—this time, without a shred of irony. The words crawled over Morgana’s spine. “Your lot can preach and preach ‘til you’re blue in the face—hero or madman, he ain’t coming back, and he ain’t pulling your ‘Rhalgr’s Wyrm’ out of his arse again.” Her lined mouth pulled itself taut and thin, and her voice lost its hard certainty. “Blackram’s primal gone tainted this place long ago, anyroad.”

Ilberd was quiet for a moment, playing into her assumption that they were the very people they had come looking for: a small faction in the Undercity claiming to be spearheaded by the true Griffin. They had made contact with Riot a few days past, stating their interest in an audience with the woman who would be the warden of the Undercity—and if Morgana had the fool girl right, the only reason she’d shared that bit of news with Raubahn was because this concerned the tainted legacy of one of his conscripts.

Riot could dress it up however she liked; she did not expect, nor especially want, Raubahn’s involvement. Neither did he want to get involved—he had too much sense to jump into that midden wholeheartedly—but he was a stubborn fool whose years in Ul’dah had taught him to find the blades in the dark before they were buried in his back.

Morgana would have preferred to handle this alone, but it might have driven her mad. And Ilberd was _good._

That was like to drive her mad just as quick. Of course the bastard was good at lying; he’d done nothing else for the past five years.

He worked his frown into something that softened the more he seemed to think, as though the crone’s words held weight he’d never considered. 

“Perhaps you’re right, grandmother,” he said, open and honest. “But we have to hope, no? For something better.”

“Ain’t got enough years left for hope, sonny.” The crone waved her uneven-fingered hand at Ilberd, shooing him away. “You go and learn how to want things that won’t get you dead away from my fire, now.”

“Sorry to bother you, grandmother. Twelve’s blessings to you,” Ilberd said, shuffling away with a bow of his head.

As soon as he was in reach and out of the old woman’s field of vision, Morgana grabbed his sleeve just above his elbow and dragged him away at a quicker pace.

“What in the seven hells was that?” she hissed—only when they were out of earshot.

“I know,” Ilberd said, still cloaked in the smug ease he hadn’t worn in months. It belied his discomfort—the scratching at his bones that the old crone’s words were sure to have left inside him as they had Morgana—and she had no time for it. “That woman could be you in fifteen years.”

“Fifteen years?” she shot back, sharp and sure as prepared artillery. “Daft bastard. You need to work on your sums.”

Ilberd smirked, but there was no real satisfaction in the bout of insolence. He stilled his steps, tucked himself against a battered obelisk barely taller than he was, and looked at Morgana head-on.

“Rhalgr’s Wyrm,” he said, his deep voice turned grim. “They’re looking to summon Yiazmat again.”

“And using the Griffin name to do it. What a load of tripe.” Morgana let out an uneasy sigh. “Do you think it could be one of your doubles behind it?”

“It’s a possibility. One of them operated on this side of the Wall to fill the ranks.”

“What could they possibly want with Yiazmat? It’s over. We’re free. We have no need of that monstrosity,” Morgana said, feeling herself pull at the noose still lingering around Ilberd’s neck only by speaking. She felt it choke her, too.

“How should I bloody know? All I ever wanted was to free Ala Mhigo; the Masks served the same end. If any one of them means to carry on with this madness now, it has nothing to do with my original purpose.”

Morgana knew Ilberd was right—and he knew it just as well. She scowled in silence, trying to temper her anger. It only sparked when she felt Ilberd’s fingers close around her good arm.

“Raubahn sent us here for answers,” he said quietly, too earnest. When Morgana shoved hard at his chest to break the hold, he took one step back and let out a sharp breath through his nose, lifting his chin. “We’ll find them.”

A soft hiss came in bursts from the shadows, like someone calling a cat; Neesa revealed herself, her body hugging the walls of yet another narrow tunnel Morgana hadn’t even noticed through the blanket of darkness that fell in, away from the blue lights of the Undercity. This time, she well and truly jumped.

Whole bloody place was making her soft.

“Mora,” Neesa said, almost sing-song. “Found the place you want. Touristing fun?”

Morgana took a step towards her, itching to draw a knife or pin her to the wall. She did neither.

“Call me that again and I’ll knock so many of your teeth out you won’t be able to say Saskia’s name right,” she said instead, and it would have been far more satisfying had Neesa not _grinned._

“Long as she’s the one saying my name, hey?” Neesa said, winking at Ilberd over Morgana’s shoulder before looking her up and down. “Could easy make you say my name too, big girl.”

Ilberd was quick: he hooked his arms around Morgana’s middle when she made to lunge for Neesa, keen on cutting her up in hopes that it would quiet the constant hiss of this place.

“Mm. ‘Nough dallying. Let’s go, go, go,” Neesa said, dipping into the tunnel as Morgana elbowed Ilberd in the ribs to free herself.

“Neesa,” Morgana said as they threaded through passages behind her long strides. She wasn’t pleased to have to ask, but the cost of wondering was higher. “We spoke to an old woman who… she said that the Warrior of Light killed the Griffin and ‘made the liberator out of his bones.’”

Neesa hummed. “Is what they’re saying. Like that old story about the griffins and—”

Yiazmat. “I know,” Morgana cut in before she could say the word. She’d had enough of hearing it, of feeling its name take home at the back of her mind like a weed. “But doesn’t it usually take decades to build nonsensical legends like this?”

“This is the Undercity, big girl. Don’t got sunlight, make faerie tales instead. Show little more respect, hey?” Neesa weaved derision into her crooked smile, and the crooked smile into her voice. “‘Sides—times like those we had since the Wall? They breed legends faster than mice, here or above.”

There was nothing Morgana could say to that; nothing smart, no bite. She couldn’t even conjure up some scathing look to toss Ilberd’s way for having caused such a legend to come into the world in the first place. Her silence stretched long enough to surprise Neesa, who cast glances over her shoulders as though scanning for a threat, only to give a shrug—the gesture of a woman talking with herself.

“Heroism, tragedy, and all that,” Neesa said with a wave of her hands, giving the subject finality.

She made a grand sweeping motion as they came to a door which, blessedly, swung open at the first push. “Southeast of the market hall, just like you asked,” she said, following when Morgana stepped through the doorway and into a narrow opening that swelled wider, into a roughly circular room bathed in that Undercity blue.

“You need me to guide you back out too, or can I go?” Neesa said.

“Of course I need you to—” Morgana began, then cut herself off at the sound of footsteps. Neesa lingered at her side like a beanstalk caught in a breeze when she raised a hand to stop her.

“What’ve we got here?” said a man from the shadows, emerging with another at his side—both faces hidden behind mismatched masks. “Y’ain’t _her._ ”

Another masked figure slipped in through the door behind them, guarding the exit. That was when Morgana felt Ilberd shift, put his back to hers—but at an angle. Guarding her left flank.

“Don’t think I am,” Morgana replied flatly. Underneath the wary vigilance that slipped around her like a second skin, she felt, above all, irritation. “But I certainly would love to have some words with your Griffin pretender.”

“The true Griffin will only speak to Ashelia Riot. Anyone else comes a-knockin’? Well,” the masked man said with a cock of his head, drawing a long knife. The blade was slick with blue light. “Unless you three want to have a private conversation with us,” he added, and his leer got past even the frozen stillness of his mask.

Neesa already had a blade in her hand, too. Morgana tipped her chin towards her shoulder.

“What about you, chicken?” she said—not as a taunt, but to avoid speaking his name. “Interested in a private conversation?”

“Not today,” Ilberd said.

Morgana nodded casually, then turned her gaze back towards the masked man. “Turns out we’d all much rather kill you.”

The kindling of the fight needed no more than that spark to take, and in an instant, the room burned with the ringing of blades. Neesa fought ugly, like a proper gutter rat: all survival and no finesse, no art but for the practice of constant danger. She didn’t need protection; Morgana caught her in glimpses within the spaces of her own battle, vaguely let Neesa’s capacity through her awareness, and put it aside.

These would-be Masks fought dirty, too; more like the Undercity than the Resistance. That, at the very least, was information—breathlessly gleaned and costing in blood, but information nonetheless. Morgana trusted nothing like she did the edge of her blade, the surety in the uncertain.

She kept her mask at a distance, sword against knife, but he was skinny and quick. The blade slashed along the length of her forearm: a sharp bolt of pain, but not deep enough to make her drop her sword. Blood spurred her. She lunged; missed. Swung her leaden arm, the mask dancing away, colour pulsing through her vision.

How had he gotten quicker? She saw the opening—why had he lowered his guard?—but her hand spasmed, and her sword fell to the ground with a clatter that resounded like a rhythm along the blood thrumming in her ears.

That was when she understood.

“Shite! Poison!” Neesa shouted as Morgana dropped to her knees.

Ilberd looked over his shoulder and growled. His blade was a flash of lightning as he slashed open the belly of his opponent, his motions a staccato in Morgana’s eyes as he rushed the other mask. Distantly, she heard a gurgle—Neesa’s knife plunging into flesh, again and again—and the fall of a body. Ilberd rushed the third of the masked men; the poisoned blade fell with the fingers that held it.

Morgana blinked, her body burning. In time with her spasms, she saw Ilberd’s hand tangled in dark hair, shiny with blood and dirty with shards of bone and gore as he smashed the mask into the wall. The body twitched a few times, just like hers.

“Check his clothes they usually got a dose on them check it check it,” Neesa said, swift words running together.

Blood filled her mouth, or perhaps it didn’t. The smell of it was thick in her nose: Ilberd’s hand on her jaw, prying it open, pouring something down her throat until she was swallowing and choking on it. He muttered something to her that her ears twisted beyond understanding, the rumble of his voice ebbing and flowing like a tide.

_——he’llkillmeifyoudie—_

“—slow it down.” Neesa’s quick-fire words, buzzing around like her. “Keep her still. Calm. Running for a healer.”

Running: the pitter-patter of hurried footsteps. Once there, then gone.

Morgana knew the passing of time only by the silence. Shiver upon shiver crawled up her back, over her shoulders, down to her blood-slick fingertips as Ilberd wrapped her arm. She very nearly vomited on him when he dragged her across the room to prop her back against the stone wall.

“Arroway,” he said, still echoing but taking shape. Her head lolled forward, heavy as every stone that held up this horrid place. “Still with me?”

“Here,” Morgana managed to say, feeling her lips move some more as her fingers twitched—responding to her, rather than to the poison. She could almost make a fist. _Riot can keep trying to get herself killed down here if she’s fool enough. I’m washing my hands of it._

She couldn’t tell whether she spoke the words aloud, or if there was a response. Never mind; she would repeat them to Raubahn as many times as she needed to.

Ilberd’s hands were like hot steel against Morgana’s clammy skin as he held her face up to look into her eyes. His touch was by no means gentle, but it was nothing next to the way she had treated him the last time they had been in such a position. Her vision still swam, and yet she tried to search his face, to let it come into focus that she may remember whether the bruises and scabs she’d left on his skin had faded away.

“Get your hands off me,” she said when neither of his three faces showed itself clearly enough to her. They were all too close. Morgana shoved at him, more weakly than she would have wished.

“I’ve no interest in giving you what you want, Morgana.”

It took her a few moments to realize he fancied himself a mirror of those blood-soaked moments on the Royal Menagerie, and she half-laughed, half-scoffed past the throbbing in her head. She felt battle-drunk and worn and perhaps even arak-drunk, too. 

“And what is it you want?” she dutifully repeated.

Chills shook her body as Ilberd let go of her face to sit beside her, shoulder-to-shoulder as though they were comrades. She wanted to turn and tell him that he had long since destroyed the possibility that they could ever speak with the ease they’d had when he was nothing more than a Brave, but her tongue was thick in her mouth and his voice was not poison.

“Does it matter?”

“Whinge,” Morgana said. Her hand wouldn’t lift when she wanted to bring her fist up to the corner of her eye to mock him.

“I’m not bloody whinging. I’ve asked myself that question for weeks,” Ilberd said evenly. “I’ve made my bargains; sealed my fate. Nothing matters but for what I wanted then.”

“And you have it. A free Ala Mhigo.”

Ilberd sighed, wordless and quiet. “There isn’t a place for me in it. There never was.” Morgana opened her mouth to speak, but she was slow, and he met her blow with perfect timing: “Whinge.”

She chuckled. Or, at the very least, she thought she did.

“What do you want?” Ilberd asked after a moment. “Besides not dying of poison.”

The mention of poison was enough to set her blood afire again. She tried to bring herself past it, to think outside of the corroded rivers in her own veins and grasp at words again. If she died now, let it be with honesty.

“I want my son to have a mother,” Morgana said quietly. “I want my body to belong to me again—not to a lanista or a babe, not to a bloody crystal or a primal, not to a cause. Just me. And I want you to pay.”

“Good, so I’ve made the list.”

This time, Morgana wasn’t laughing. “I watched you maim my man. I had his fucking blood on me.”

And there was nothing Ilberd could say. Neither of them wanted to hear his penance or his justifications; it was done, and the past was the past regardless of how closely it followed behind.

“So he’s ‘your man,’” Ilberd said after a moment, his tone almost inhabited by a smile. Morgana supposed he dared it because she was still poison-addled.

“Piss off. You knew.”

“Not for certain. I wanted to rile you.” He crossed his arms and leaned his head back against the wall. “Ros used to call me her man,” he said, so quietly it seemed like a wisp of a thought more than something given shape by his lips.

It twisted at Morgana’s insides. “Do you miss her?”

“Some days I can’t even seem to remember that there was a time when I was hers and she was mine. They seem like another man’s memories—and it’s only right for his sake I should let them go.”

“I feel the same about Gotwin,” Morgana said slowly. His name never stopped digging through her like blades. “My brother. He was half of me for half my life. I’d string people along when they asked if we were twins. Now I wonder if it was even really my life he was in.”

She managed to wind her arms around herself, hugging her own middle to steady her body against its own trembling. There was no mistaking the reverberation of Ilberd’s shaking shoulders against her own.

“I think of Steorra every time I look at your boy.”

“What?” She struggled for clarity. “Why?”

Morgana had never met Ilberd’s daughter; not really. She had seen her in his heart, in a raw, open wound of memory: headstrong, vibrant, and soft beneath it all in a way that was still without compromise. She could imagine that the girl was like her mother. But Sairsel? Morgana turned her head to look at Ilberd as best as she could, trying to make sense of the wall he built to hide his eyes.

“He was born the spring after Ala Mhigo fell, wasn’t he?” he asked. “She was born the spring before. She… they could’ve fought together. With us. They might have been friends.”

“Like us?” Morgana said, her sarcasm slurring.

“Like us,” Ilberd agreed. The grim irony of it was like a death sentence.

Death. This place called for death. It was shaped by it, polluted by something long gone.

And death was beside her.

“Why haven’t you ended it?” Morgana asked the stone ceiling. Blue light shuddered under her gaze, strobing. “You could have turned your sword on yourself a hundred times by now.”

“I already jumped,” Ilberd said, his resignation a hard sort.

_You shall have it all._ Morgana wished she could have jumped with him, that night at the Wall—not to die, but to make certain he did. If ever there was a moment to speak such a wish, this was it, but the words wouldn’t come.

“Sometimes,” she said quietly, like a child confessing a secret in the dark; as though the words weren’t hers, “sometimes I wish I didn’t have to hate you.”

“So do I.”

Ilberd’s lips stayed parted for a breath, to shape something else, but whatever he meant to say died in the burst of urgency Neesa brought back with her alongside the healer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a note for the early birds: this week's chapters haven't been edited with nearly the same rigor as the others because Hell Week gave me a lot less time for it - thank you for reading and for being patient with me! i'll revise them a few more times and remove this note once i'm satisfied with the quality.


	19. THE RESENTFUL ONES

He never saw the first punch coming.

More fool he for thinking that he might get through to the end of the day in relative anonymity—and, most of all, for volunteering in the first place.

The guard had taken him out of his cell at sunrise to join the labourers: hard men and women, just like the work they did and the land they toiled. Sweating under the sun and chafing their hands on stone to rebuild old walls in time with the beating heart of their nation, breathing the dust of a coming storm.

In truth, he hadn’t really thought, and certainly not much further than making his living corpse useful. Do his part. He was well-fed, and had slept more since the liberation than he had in the five years that preceded it; there was little more to do in a cell than to sleep and train. Still, when he was alone—even among living strangers—he yet felt like a dead man walking.

The parts of himself he had broken into shards to pour into Yiazmat, he suspected, had not been put back together right.

But among the workers, he might have been one among many: strong arms to swing a pickaxe, nameless and without a legacy of horror, a man at his realest in the marks he left on the stone. They could all be the same.

And now the thin film of limestone dust that covered their hands mingled with the blood on his lips. Surprise left him stumbling, blinded by disadvantage; the air shifted, announcing another swing, and he raised an arm to block. Instinct that the labourers did not have, but that they did not need.

Strength in numbers. When knuckles crashed on the bone of his forearm, the jeering that rose turned to directives. _Hold him down._ He felt a woman’s chest pressed against his sweat-slick back in an instant, clumsy with aggression, but the way she locked his arms with hers was anything but. It pulled at his muscles and dug bruises into his flesh, but thirty years of fighting pushed the pain to the back of his mind, and reaction to the forefront.

The woman, first: heel on the bones of her foot, breaking if he had to. Get himself free, dodge the panicked strike of the closest man who would see the threat of him; try to find a way to have no one at his back. Find a weapon. The handle of a pickaxe, or a rock the size of his palm, at the very least.

Ilberd knew how easy it could have been to get out of this, in spite of all the odds—their number, his age, his willingness to endure punishment—had their words not cut through formless shouted insults.

“This is for my sister,” said the fist that drove into his gut.

Siblings, partners, children; cousins, friends. A father, once. They took turns, solemn in their righteous fury and jagged violence, and each punch came with a name he’d never heard or a thread he’d broken.

His body throbbed and his breath was short—distantly, he thought that he’d be lucky if nothing ruptured inside him. Nasty business, that; he’d seen enough miserable, shit- and blood-soaked death to want something cleaner. On the Wall, for half a heartbeat, he’d seen a flash of himself as though watching another from above, his body broken on Garlean steel—smashed skull, bones at angles fit for a puppet, jaw twisted in a final madman’s laugh.

He didn’t dream of it as often as he had under the old theatre, with the Undercity and its creeping hold on death just beyond a door, but there were still nights…

It made him wonder what it was he deserved. And perhaps it was this: judgement as swift and messy as that which he had brought upon his own people—not punishment, but mere consequence.

The woman holding his arms let go long enough that he could have clawed himself out of the midden, but his body did not answer his instincts. The sky spun above him, besides, and his feet barely held him steady on the ground. When she kicked him behind the knees, it was all he could do to catch himself on his hands and scrape his palms raw, spitting blood out on the stone rather than choke on it.

“Fight back!” shouted one youth from above before burying a boot in his side, and the pain echoed with the sound that buzzed around his skull—

_“Ilberd, you bastard, fight back!”_ —and it sounded, so strangely, like Morgana’s voice.

He lifted his head and saw only strangers in the crowd; to no one did he proclaim that he had no intention to fight back. They would see it as defiance or resignation, and it was neither. He heard the taunt again, and this time, it came with the threat of a heel crushing his fingers, stomping down on the stone as he slipped away.

He pushed himself up to stand, dizzy and stumbling. His tongue ran along the tender, stinging skin of his split lip, far beyond tasting the blood that stained his teeth—there was nothing but the taste of metal in his mouth.

“Have you asked yourself,” he said to no one in particular, drawing breath from his burning lungs, “if you’re going to stop?” None answered him. “Make the choice quick before someone else makes it for you.”

It was one thing to beat a man bloody, regardless of purpose or intent; it was another entirely to beat a man to death. They were not warriors, and many of them young. Someone had to make them realize that—that this would end because they had walked away, or because they hadn’t. One way or another, it would end, and the how of it was no choice of his.

Pain was a tide. He floated at the surface of the water, drowned as though they were holding his head under it. One eye half-shut, he stared up at the blue sky and realized he was flat on his back against hard stone. Nausea roiled at the pit of his stomach where he’d been struck, and bile seared the back of his throat. It was instinct, again, that made him roll over. Sweat slicked the hollow of his spine as he pushed his scratched palms to the ground.

“Oi!” boomed a woman’s voice, its weight familiar—though its volume wasn’t. She was always rather meek; authority suited her. “What the hells are you doing? Get away from him! Away before I’m made to gut one of you!”

“Why do you protect him, Basin? You know he—”

“Because it’s my bloody duty, is why!” Singing Basin shouted. “Now piss off!”

She was big enough to push through the reticent crowd, a pack of feral cats forced to relinquish a dead mouse by a barking hound. When her silhouette blotted out the sun, Ilberd could make out the frown on her face, the panic settling in.

“Oh, gods, oh, fuck,” she muttered, spreading two shaking hands to hover above his body as she worked up the magicks. “Oh, balls, I’m gonna get demoted, I’m—fuck!”

Ilberd shook under the searing current with which she mended the rib he hadn’t even heard crack—now, he was aware of it. Pain burst red-hot through his side. “You’re a healer?” he rasped.

“A bad one, so don’t move,” Singing Basin said shakily, her words bracketed by curses.

She wore herself out as he fell into stillness, trembling but mostly whole. If he closed his eyes and focused only on the thrumming of blood in his ears, he could sink into the pain almost to the point where there was nothing else. Too soon, Singing Basin was hauling him to his feet, looping his arm around her wide shoulders. The sunlight burned him.

“I have to take you to—gods, my captain will _kill_ me, I can’t—”

Singing Basin kept on muttering—and if it wasn’t to herself, Ilberd wasn’t listening. He put one foot in front of the other, forcing his body to follow her direction through the cobbled streets. 

Not towards the Ala Mhigan Quarter and his cell; up through the city. The stairs were a torment.

He was slouching against Singing Basin more and more when she stopped to pound at a door, still fretful. It opened with crisp fogweed smoke lingering in the air from the still-lit pipe in Morgana’s hand.

“What the fuck is this?”

“Captain—er, ma’am— Miss Arroway,” Singing Basin said, but Morgana didn’t let her continue. She pulled away from the door, urging them inside and gesturing to the pair of chairs around a pockmarked kitchen table.

“Get him in here. Sit him—fine. You can let go now,” Morgana said sharply, a laughable contrast to the ginger way Singing Basin helped him settle down in one of the chairs. She set down a pitcher of water and a battered tin cup on the table so unceremoniously that the sound jostled through Ilberd’s pounding skull. “How did this happen?”

“He volunteered to help with repairs on Flint Street. The workers— no one paid him any mind until I… there was this little girl, ma’am, she ran to me and said that her friend was in danger, so I—”

Morgana’s anger curled around her like the wisps of fogweed smoke. “You left your post?” Singing Basin wouldn’t meet her gaze, and so she urged her on. “So? How went your child-saving heroics?”

“She, er, I lost track of her, ma’am. I must have got caught in a prank.”

“Or someone paid her to lead you away, you daft brute!”

“Don’t be a cunt, Arroway,” Ilberd managed to say. He hated how his words were on the edge of slurring, how his arm had curled around his middle like a small thing protecting itself.

“She brought you bleeding into my home. I can act however I please,” Morgana snapped. Ilberd realized, distantly, that the highland burr had found its way back onto her tongue since coming home, catching harshly on her anger. “Are the workers still there? On Flint Street?” she asked Singing Basin.

“Aye, ma’am. I imagine they’re getting a tongue-lashing from the foreman for wasting time.”

“I’ve heard enough. Go back and tell your captain I came to take Feare off your hands on the commander’s orders,” Morgana said, looking even more unnerved with the hopeful look that crossed Singing Basin’s face at the realization that she might avoid immediate censure. She jerked her head towards the door. “Get the fuck out of my house.”

“Aye, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”

She waited until Singing Basin had closed the door behind her—rather more like a mouse than a Hellsguard—to let a sharp breath out through her nose. Then she turned, picked a bowl from a shelf and set it down on the table beside the jug, tossing a rag over the rim.

“Clean yourself up. I don’t want blood on my table.”

Ilberd dreaded moving. He went slowly, bearing both the throbbing that came violently awake all over his body and the shame of Morgana watching him move like a boy who’d taken his first beating, and reached for the jug. His palms burned when he tried to close his hand around the handle; there was no lifting it. At the hiss of breath he let slip from between his teeth, Morgana sighed and poured water into the bowl.

“I ought to go draw saltwater,” she said as she soaked the rag and wrung it out one-handed. The poisoned cut on her right forearm was healing well, he noticed; her bandages were gone. While his attention caught on her broken skin, hers lingered on his hands. “So you just lay there and took it?” she demanded of his uninjured knuckles.

“I got back up,” Ilberd said.

Morgana shook her head, mouth drawn thin the way it was when she wanted to hit something and couldn’t. Her eyes went to the door; some impulse sparked, and she slammed down her pipe.

“What do you think you’re about to do?”

“I’m going to teach those little bastards a lesson about trying to beat the living shite out of someone who’ll actually fight back,” she said. Her stormy determination baffled Ilberd.

He didn’t let her go two steps before speaking. “How well will that go for Raubahn, do you think? The commander’s guard dog going wild and knocking down the few civilians who got to do what everyone wants to do,” he said, too light-headed to muster the tone he wanted—the right twist of his voice that got under Morgana’s skin. He fell well short of it and it still hurt to speak, but by the look on her face, the words worked. “And that’s as long as it isn’t common knowledge that you’re in his bed as well as at his right hand.”

“Another word and I’ll throw you out on your ear.”

Though her position had surely lost its uncertain novelty over the passing weeks, Morgana still wasn’t used to the idea of accountability and consequence; whatever deference she’d learned as a captain in the Resistance, overwriting the sellsword’s freedom she had enjoyed in the younger years, she’d forgotten quickly enough once she became a hero to Eorzea. Ilberd had resented her for that from the moment he’d met her, arrogant in her hard edges and unwilling to give up the comforts of her lofty position to truly fight; now, it almost made him want to laugh.

He didn’t want to think of the pain that would rip through him if he did, and so he tamped down the bitter impulse and watched frustration twist its way around Morgana’s body.

“You’ve no cause to be angry about this,” Ilberd said after a moment, his jaw tensing as he cleaned dirt and dust out of the raw skin of his palms.

Morgana picked her pipe back up, the burning herbs crackling as she sucked in a breath. Smoke veiled the hard curve of her mouth. “Don’t I?” she asked, still abrasive. Her teeth worried the stem of the pipe.

“You of all people know that I—”

“Don’t say ‘deserve it,’” she said, cutting him off before he could. When she moved towards him, Ilberd couldn’t suppress a flinch, his instincts preparing him to dodge. She paused, but said nothing to shame him, and braced a hand on the edge of the table. “I of all people want to see you punished. For as long as I live, I will.”

“It’s good to know the fogweed hasn’t completely relieved you of your senses,” Ilberd said dryly.

He knew it was for the pain—and he almost wanted to reach for the pipe and take a few puffs for himself—that the poison had knocked loose inside her; the sort of pain that lingered. He knew it, but the comment came to him like the easiest sword stroke, and he knew that Morgana felt more comfortable fending off blows than sitting in some strained simulacrum of friendship. 

Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t get smart,” she said, and shook her head. “If anyone deserves to knock you around, it’s me. But I don’t want a martyr, do you hear? I want to be angry. I need you to—”

The fist pounding at the door may as well have been inside Ilberd’s skull. His shoulders tensed; that pained him, too.

“I’m busy,” Morgana said, tossing a shout towards the door.

It wasn’t barred after Singing Basin’s exit, and swung open after three more insistent knocks. Morgana’s boy strode in, pausing at the sight of Ilberd—bloodied and miserable, he imagined—long enough to shift his grave expression towards confusion. The fool of a boy on the Wall, naïve with reckless hatred, was almost entirely gone from him.

Ilberd wondered at the ugliness of the scar he must have left on his chest.

“Now’s not the time, boy,” Morgana said.

“You’ll make the bloody time,” Sairsel snapped. His eyes were hard—even harder than he’d looked when he held a blade to Ilberd’s throat, angry and wild in a way that could only seem lost. This time, with his fists tight at his sides, he looked enraged. Less a boy and more a man with every passing day.

He was breathless, too. He’d been running. “There’s been a report from scouts at the border,” he said, words like the fall of a blade. “Troops from several imperial legions have begun marching west—and it’s not just the XIIth.”

Ilberd heard Morgana’s breath hitch—the blade had slipped between her ribs. He didn’t know if his breath even got to his lungs; the room spun, and Sairsel’s tense frame split into two perfect images.

He steadied himself. Focused on the grim lines of the boy’s face, eyes and nose raptor-sharp. Tried to hold the pieces of their world in his hands before it shattered again.

“They’re coming back for us,” Sairsel said.

They were coming back for war.


	20. AN ARROW INTO DARKNESS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> > i am not afraid to keep on living  
> i am not afraid to walk this world alone  
> honey, if you stay, i'll be forgiven  
> nothing you can say can stop me going home
> 
> ― [famous last words](https://open.spotify.com/track/2d6m2F4I7wCuAKtSsdhh83?si=KwAfyIL0QYijeXIyhw1GIg), my chemical romance

Unlike many youths Ilberd had known in his years fighting—unlike himself at the age of his first battles—Fordola did not fidget as they traveled to the front. Her sword lay flat across her knees, her gaze fixed on the gloom in the horizon. Though they were not heading into battle just yet, they were heading into war; and still, the look in her eyes was one aged well beyond her years.

She had already known war. She already had a lifetime’s worth of regrets, of nightmares to haunt her nights, of loss—all gifts of the Empire, the manure from which he had sprouted. Ilberd wondered if the thought of revenge seemed as exhausting to her as it did to him, now that it was in reach, but perhaps her youth favoured her.

The boy beside Fordola, as he understood it, was the furthest thing from a convict: as a junior member of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, he was here by choice. Likely a foolish one, but he had seen war, too—like all the youths born after the death of the King of Ruin, he had known only occupation, and fought for the liberty of an Ala Mhigo he might never see. He did not fidget, either.

“I’m Arenvald,” said the boy for Ilberd’s benefit. He seemed ill at ease with the silence in which his traveling companions were perfectly comfortable. Ilberd did not bother to introduce himself; wherever the boy had been when the Braves took the Rising Stones, he surely knew exactly who sat across from him. “Have you been to Ghimlyt before?”

“No.” Ilberd meant to say nothing more, but there was something expectant in the boy’s manner that drew the words out of him. “Had a friend once who did, when he fought for the mad king.”

It felt like more than a lifetime since Raubahn had gone off to fight at the border only to return in pieces. At first, he’d been quiet as he mended, taking his return home as a failure—and then, slowly, he had confided the things he’d seen. The creeping darkness of the place, with only a sliver of light on the horizon; the grey-black shroud over the sky that took magitek light like paint on a midnight canvas; the rain of artillery fire during the worst of the assaults. The stench of smoke and death, the mangled bodies.

Raubahn was lucky to be sent home over an arrow to the knee, old man Aldynn had said, rather than having had chunks of him blown off.

They were boys, then, no older than the youths who sat with Ilberd now, and they had turned their fear into indignation—and Curtis Hext had turned the indignation into swords.

How strange it must be, to return to this place after so many years—not quite whole, and still fighting the same enemy. The same war.

Arenvald glanced at Fordola as though asking her to help him fill the silence. The cart rattled on; the sway knocked his pauldron against her shoulder time and time again, yet neither moved away. Fordola said nothing as the pall of the sky grew larger and nearer.

They deserved better than to spend their youth always fighting the same war.

The Alliance headquarters were a mess of chaos and noise, even during the night; even on days without engagement. Everyone, to the last man, had their function—but that did not mean that it lessened the anxiety that crackled through the air, the anger and grief weaving every skirmish into the next. War was all ranks and titles and orders; nothing Morgana had ever signed up for, and yet it was in her life just as well as though she had.

The rebellion against the mad king. The invasion and the liberation. And now—

And now this: Ghimlyt, haunted by the threat of the Empire—a blade sinking into a wound that was still far from healing. Here, it didn’t matter whether she was a sellsword or a hero or some imitation of a military woman; all she knew to feel, rather than anger or displacement, was a bone-deep ache that wouldn’t fade no matter how many days passed.

She had been made to fight; she had known this for most of her life. Gotwin would joke that she had come out of their mother’s womb with sword in hand, and that she would likely draw her dying breath covered in someone else’s blood just the same. But this fight… she tired of this fight. Of watching her brothers and sisters die to wrench the freedom they deserved out of the Empire’s hands.

Of fearing for the lives of the few people she let herself love—because they were all here. They all fought, because the imperials gave them no other choice.

The dark was thick over her eyes, and there were some days where she couldn’t get the feeling of choking on smoke out of her throat.

“Morgana.”

She could hardly make sense of being addressed by her given name, too, rather than a rank or the family name she bore alone. No—not alone. Sairsel had chosen it for her sake, long before she ever was in his life, over that of his father and his clan. Still, her own name seemed like a stranger’s, these days.

“Might I speak with you for a moment?” said Alisaie, standing off to Morgana’s left with her fingers wrapped around the hilt of her rapier. 

The vigilance was unnecessary here—there was something about the feeling of safety at the front, when no other place offered it—but unavoidable. It cut through flesh, settled into your bones. The poor girl was so young, her skin thinner no matter her strength. The feeling must have made its home inside her long ago.

“What do you need?” Morgana asked.

“Nothing, really,” Alisaie said—not sheepish, but subdued. Not quite like herself. “I only thought someone should know, because—” she cut herself off with a sigh, pulling her shoulders down. “Sairsel isn’t… quite well. He’s been restless.”

Something about Alisaie softened Morgana, because her words came not nearly as sharply as they always did: “We’re all restless.”

“I know. He’ll be glad to fight, I think, just to be doing _something,_ ” and here Morgana knew Alisaie’s words were true for herself, as well, “but it weighs on him.”

“The voice?” Morgana asked carefully.

“The voice. The others. Zenos. All of it.”

Nothing to be done about it. Not so long ago, Morgana would have told her the same and believed it, but something scratched a hole inside her heart like an animal digging into rain-soaked dirt. She knew not what she could do for her son, to protect him and ease his burdens, and that meant she had no words to say to Alisaie. And the girl, clever bloody heart, she saw it.

“Someone ought to know, is all,” Alisaie reiterated, holding herself in a stiff way that could only remind Morgana of Alphinaud. “Just in case… So he has someone looking out for him.”

Someone looking out for him in her place, Morgana understood. Of course she was afraid—likely as afraid to be left alone as she was afraid Sairsel would be.

Alisaie gave a final nod and made to leave, but Morgana didn’t let her. Not while the poor girl made her ache.

“Alisaie,” she said, and spoke no other word until she had those bright blue eyes on her. “Are you all right?”

Alisaie mustered the same smile her brother had in Coerthas, when his whole world had fallen apart around him and there was nothing left to do but to look ahead. “I’d be lying if I said I’m having a grand time. But I’d rather just keep moving.”

“Just don’t be stupid,” Morgana said. What else could she? There was no reassuring her that everything would be all right—it would be a lie to say that her brother would be fine, that neither she or Sairsel would fall, that the Alliance would prevail. All she could do was reach out and pat her shoulder. “He’s looking out for you, too.”

Something young and vulnerable flitted across Alisaie’s expression, but only for an instant.

“I know,” she said, and that invited no more elder’s wisdom or comfort. She would be as strong as she could, and Morgana had no doubt of that.

“There’s a good lass.”

Alisaie smiled, hard with determination. It was only a matter of hours before Sairsel returned from the front with her in his arms, silent and faded.

Magitek blasts shook the very earth underneath Ilberd’s feet.

It was not the first time he faced imperial forces—far from it. He had been twenty the first time, with a coin purse to send home in exchange for his steel and his life; barely twenty-five the second, when Garleans poured through the streets spitting death and fire; thirty-nine on the fringes of Carteneau, by then after uncountable failed attempts to cut his countrymen a path to liberation, among a company of doomed sellswords who had pulled at his frayed belief that this might be the first real step. Twenty years he’d been fighting to go home, and weathering the chaos never got easier.

Ilberd tasted his own sweat, someone else’s blood, and the acrid remnants of gunpowder—a bitter taste, nauseating enough along with the smell of gore and shit all around to make him want to retch. Every time he heard a blast, something pulled at him and he was at the Wall again, if only for a heartbeat: armoured weapons crawling through Resistance troops in their stolen Alliance colours, firing and ripping their bodies apart on the orders of their own.

Necessary deaths, he’d thought, in service to the lives that had been shattered and those that would yet be fettered until the griffin flew upon Ala Mhigo’s walls once more.

Whether it seemed now like another man’s thoughts having taken shape in his mind was of no consequence; he had believed it to the very depths of his twisted soul. There was no denying it, no forgetting, no expunging his deeds no matter how much he bled here and now.

Still, he fought. He would fight the Empire to the edge of his last breath, in the blood-soaked dark, and he would do it alone if he must.

Breathless, Ilberd cast a look over his surroundings and saw none of his unit. Alliance colours flashed at the flank, gaining ground—but he saw no Resistance uniforms, and he knew not when they had been separated. When he’d run to avoid a blast from a flying claw, perhaps. Or when he’d chased after the broken remnants of a retreating squad to cut them down. All he knew was that there was no one at his shoulder.

It was easy for one man to run in a war; easy to disappear in the chaos. He took stock of his surroundings once more, tracing the paths of Ghimlyt by the searchlights cutting columns of white into the sky and matching them against the Alliance’s plans in his mind. Raubahn, doling out orders without a shred of doubt. More men to the fore, more support, towards—

Ilberd ran.

He cut through the fighting, sword in hand, ready to meet whatever opposition he might face; he stepped over bodies and dodged artillery fire with fire in his lungs, circling trenches to stay out of the path of the searchlights.

And at last he came to the very edge, to the place where the Ghimlyt Dark most keenly wore its name—the place where it could all end.

The churning of aether was familiar around the body of Zenos yae Galvus, fallen for only an instant: the Ascian wearing his flesh traveled from death to life as one might cross the threshold of a home, as easily as the one he had known would step in and out of his presence. The mere sight of it made his skin crawl.

Morgana’s boy stood bravely at the center of it all—undaunted, angrier than he was afraid. When the Ascian spoke with Zenos’ voice—familiar tones, too, like something Ilberd might have heard in a dream, almost cajoling in its domination—Sairsel only struck at him again, working up all his strength to silence that voice. One stroke of Zenos’ blade pushed him back.

Ilberd watched with a dead man’s grip around the hilt of his sword, entombed in remnants of Yiazmat’s fury; he watched as Sairsel growled and lunged, as he ran and stumbled halfway to Zenos as though he had taken an arrow to the chest.

He fell to his knees shaking, fighting against the thing bringing him low from the inside. The Ascian watched, too. And then he stepped forward, unhurried, and raised his blade.

Ilberd’s body broke its chains. He moved, unthinking and unfeeling, until all he knew was the ache pushing through his arms and shoulders as his sword crossed death’s path. Steel scraped against steel; a flicker of recognition, belonging to the Ascian, lit Zenos’ cold gaze where his helm had shattered.

“So the Griffin has shed his mask.”

Ilberd gritted his teeth, pushing back against the Ascian’s blade. “Shall I show you how?”

“Hmph,” said the Ascian.

Rage filled his body and his mind, as bitter as the taste of blood in his mouth. There was no revenge that he could take. The Ascian had given the Eyes, and he had taken them willingly. In this, he hadn’t even fought.

Zenos’ eye watched him, looking deep as the Ascian once had, seeing the jagged edges beyond the mask. “Where is your soul, summoner?” he asked, slick as poison.

It was no fight that Ilberd could win. He knew it all as he poured all the strength he had into holding back the tide, only for the crossed swords to sink lower towards him. Fire crawled up and down his lungs. He only needed to hold out long enough for Sairsel to get up and save his skin.

The fool of a boy had to know that there was no winning this. He only had to get up.

“Nowhere you can reach,” Ilberd spat.

Behind him, another battle was lost: Sairsel collapsed.

“And so does your hero fall.”

Ilberd stumbled underneath his own strength as the Ascian stepped back and lowered his blade; he spared what remained of the battlefield no more than a glance as he turned away. Driven by what remained of his anger, Ilberd ran for him—but his sword only sliced through air as the Ascian stepped into the nothing that carried him away.

For a moment, he could only stand there, shoulders so taut they ached and hands shaking, and then his body remembered the urgency of putting himself between the Ascian and Sairsel. This mattered more than the war. More than his mistakes.

The first time Ilberd had seen the boy lying motionless and surrounded by death, it had been nothing. His own blade had cut him down, and the blood pooling underneath him held little more significance than water; this time, dread rattled inside the prison of Ilberd’s ribs as he sank to his knees beside Sairsel.

“Oi,” he said, patting roughly at his cheek. “Come on, boy.”

His other hand pulled at the folds of Sairsel’s jacket, searching for injuries. He was bruised and scratched and bloodied from the battle, but only on the surface—and yet, utterly motionless. 

Like a body choked to death by smoke.

His fingers curled at Sairsel’s collar, shaking him; pressed against his throat. Sairsel’s pulse beat slowly against his skin, and when he opened his mouth to speak, Ilberd heard his own voice like it belonged to someone else, choked and rasping.

“‘S’all right, lad. ‘S’all right.”

He laid down his sword beside Sairsel to free his hands, hauling his motionless body—still, but not without life, he thought desperately as the gaping wound of the past threatened to come awake inside him—onto his shoulder. It was a heavier weight to bear than he had thought, but he steadied his free hand around the grip of his sword.

The storm of war still raged; neither side had realized Zenos’ departure from the battlefield. Ilberd could barely hear the cacophony of the fighting over the sound of his own breath and the blood pulsing in his ears as he ran. He heard not the screams, the clashing of blades, the soulless advance of magitek steel—he only saw what was ahead, the threats. When imperials crossed his path, he cut them down, barely slowing.

He was not looking over his shoulder. Distantly, he heard the blast of a gunblade; the next moment, he was on his knees, his right hand empty of his sword, and pain split his shoulder in two where the blade had struck. The imperial standing over him gurgled, tinny under the helm.

Ilberd scrambled to his feet, trying not to sway under the weight of Sairsel’s body. Blood slid thickly down his arm; someone put a sword back in his hand. When he turned his head, Fordola was beside him, hard and angry and _young._

She gave him a nod that spoke of protection, but her words were far sharper. “What are you waiting for? Go!”

He had no memory of running the rest of the way. The fog of his wound made him pain-drunk, stumbling as he dragged himself past the safety of the Alliance banners. Someone yelled for a medic; in the haze, when hands reached for Sairsel, he almost held tighter onto him until he realized that they meant to keep him safe.

Morgana ran to her son, following the stretcher. When they passed Ilberd, he couldn’t make sense of the way she looked at him. His vision swayed and blurred in her wake—and then Raubahn’s hand was at his elbow, steadying him.

“You brought him home,” Raubahn said, and it sounded almost like gratitude.

Something came loose inside Ilberd then—something knotted so tightly around him that he hadn’t been able to take a full breath for five years. The old wound between his ribs wept like a festering thing. With a clarity that seemed to belong to someone else, he thought of Fordola and Arenvald at the front, two sides of the same coin; he did not dare plead with the Destroyer to let them go home, too.

Raubahn’s touch at his elbow burned, sapping him of what strength he had left; Sairsel was gone, and Morgana with him. For now, there was no fight left to fight.

Ilberd let go. He let himself fall.

“I know you will not ask,” Raubahn said quietly as he came to stand beside Morgana inside her tent, as though afraid to wake Sairsel from sleeping, “but he will live.”

There was no need to speak his name; Morgana knew. She held her arms crossed, fingers touching the scar above her right elbow—the gift Ilberd’s blade had left on her skin on the night of the banquet—and kept her gaze on Sairsel. He lay as still and peaceful as the dead; there were times when she had to force herself to keep her wits and watch his chest rise and fall when some small, fearful part of her started to imagine that he was dead.

She wished she could still see the babe he had been on his sleeping face. His eyes were the same, she knew, but he had let his stubble grow enough that the shape of his jaw, the line of his mouth, the proud curves of his cheekbones could only be those of a man. He had his grandmother’s aquiline nose, just like his sister—Morgana could barely remember the faces of Sairsel’s family in the forest, short and painful as her time with them had been, but she remembered this much.

“His injury?” she asked, distracted.

“Not pretty. Fordola Lupis has reported from the front—she says the enemy struck him and discharged the gunblade at the same time into the back of his shoulder. But the chirurgeons did good work; they are optimistic that he will not lose the arm.”

Morgana snorted, but it was only a shade of real amusement. “Would’ve been some great bloody irony,” she said. Then she shook her head. “The gods and their jokes. I might have laughed at that one.”

“Not I,” said Raubahn simply. Of course; Morgana had been watching him for months while his guilt and integrity tore at each other’s throats, only to be worn down by the love he still felt for the man Ilberd had been—the man he still believed Ilberd could be, in spite of everything.

For the first time, she no longer knew what to think of it. She knew what she was meant to feel for that man, but she felt so worn down, too, that she couldn’t bring herself to feel as she had for so long. Her rage felt less like a weapon and more like a disease.

“He saved my boy’s life,” she whispered, even if they were alone. 

She wanted no one but Raubahn to hear her admit it. The Doman lord Sairsel had the moon eyes for had come in limping to check on him once he’d been dragged back from the battlefield, battered but alive—and he had said that he saw Zenos about to deliver what was sure to be a killing blow before Ilberd put himself between them. It still made her nauseous with dread just to keep the thought alive in her mind.

“Aye,” Raubahn said. His hand rose to touch her back, thumb following the line of her spine.

“I can’t forgive him. You know I can’t.”

“You don’t need to, Morgana,” he said—and finally, _finally,_ she realized that neither had he. The mercy in his heart absolved nothing, but it was mercy all the same, and needed nothing else to be. “Neither would he accept it. I imagine he did it for the same reasons you brought his children’s remains back to Coldhearth.”

Because it was right. Because they deserved better. For all the things that family could have had—perhaps even with her own.

Morgana harshly blinked back the tears that stung her eyes; when had she slept last? Sairsel had been lying silent on her cot for hours. Raubahn’s arm encircled her shoulders, bringing her close to kiss her head before touching his brow to hers.

“Try to rest,” he said. “I’ll see to it that he is brought back to the Rising Stones and into Mistress Baldesion’s care with the other Scions.”

Morgana fought the impulse to say that they would have to pry her son out of her cold, dead hands; it would serve nothing and no one to cling to him now. She could only let go until he came back to her, and hold on tighter then. She nodded.

Sairsel was strong. He had always been—it wasn’t Hydaelyn’s blessing that made him stubborn and resilient and forest-soft. He had clawed his way to Ala Mhigo’s liberation; he would claw his way out of this.

Raubahn squeezed her hand on his way out of her tent, and she touched her fingers to his palm until he had slipped away. Alone, Morgana stood still, then walked forward. She lowered herself beside the cot, lying with the solid earth under her back, and reached up.

Her hand found Sairsel’s. She closed her eyes, though she did not sleep, and held his hand until he woke.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE END.
> 
> we made it, lads! if you have gotten this far, thank you. i'm extremely grateful to everyone who has read, followed, left kudos, commented, and shared this story on social media; it has been a joy to write, and an even greater joy to share. 💚 thank you again to [livvy](https://onwesterlywinds.tumblr.com/), for her invaluable input, ideas, and support; and to [gill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefateofivalice), for tolerating us unfortunate ilberd stans and appreciating the sexy value of the dark knight plunging at her archnemesis. this story would not be the same without them.
> 
> if you liked my work, feel free to drop me a line! you can also find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/vulpinewood) for shitposts, btcb secrets, and, as always, pictures of morgana's arms. we'll probably see each other in this universe again.


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